Mobile Me and You- Instant messaging apps: Methodology (Part 2)
We live in a society where mobile phones have won a permanent place in our lives. Nowadays, they seem to have become a necessity for most people and especially for Millennials. Thus, it has been a very interesting task for us to explore the “relationship” that young people have with their mobile phones, in the framework of New Consuming Trends course of Panteion University, taught by our professor Mrs Betty Tsakarestou. During this course our team participated on a research project called Mobile Me and You concerning mobile collaborative consumption and sharing economy that are now on the rise. My team specifically chose to focus our part of the research on the use of instant messaging apps.
Mobile Me and You was an on-going project, during which we were making α weekly research and then we were presenting the results in class, so as to get a feedback and move on. Our professor was guiding us through all the way and she was indicating us the methods that would make our projects not only academic, but also professional. We worked with participatory, creative and collaborative design methods in the setting up of Mobile Me and You projects . Then, we moved to more user-centric methods with contextual interviews, based on a discussion guide to get in-depth insights. That discussion guide was a result of our professor’s and all teams’ collaboration, so as for every team to have in the first part, common research questions and in the second part, more specific ones, concerning the topic each one had chosen. Let’s see one by one the steps that we followed in order to complete this project.
In the beginning of our research, each one of us created a “Mobile Me” video, which was like a diary of how we use our mobile phones. Since we have the same, more or less, demographic characteristics as our focus group (Μillennials with a university education), we found it very useful to start our research by observing our own personal mobile habits.
Our next task was to create, as a team this time, a “Mobile You” video by interviewing two of our friends. My team and I decided to interview Mariana Kazmierczak from Poland and Sara Antanasijevic from Montenegro, as we found it more interesting to see what people our age from other countries have to say about their relationship with their phones. Next step was to interview two friends from non-European countries and we chose to have a conversation with Bastian Diaz from Chile and Raissa Monnerat from Brazil. Every week, we presented our videos in class and we discussed with our classmates and professor the insights we received from our interviewees. Thus, observing all the interviews taken by our class’s teams, we soon began to have a basic understanding of the way millennials use their phones and their opinions over several matters concerning social media, different kind of apps or other mobile trends.
Later on, we created a flip chart during class, where we placed on one column our insights from all “Μobile Μe” videos of my team (composed by Konstantina Nikolopoulou, elena kouki and myself) and on another column the insights of the interviews we had so far. After that flip chart, we cooperated with two other teams in order to create another flip chart that now contained our insights all together. This was not a difficult task to do, since our insights proved to be quite similar.
On our next lesson, we got to decide the subject on which each team was going to focus and my team chose to occupy with instant messaging apps. When every team had found their main research subject we created one common flip chart, where every team wrote questions worth to be asked about their specific subjects. My team completed the flip chart with questions that we thought we ought to ask our future interviewees over their use of instant messaging apps. When we all read all groups’ questions, we chose a number of them that we thought we could all use for our research along with the more specific ones. The representatives of each team had later to work together to create, in collaboration with our Mrs. Betty Tsakarestou, a conversation guide we would all have to use for our interviews. Our research would include ten interviews with Millennials with an academic background.
With my teammates, we decided that it would be more interesting to continue our research with semi-structured interviews with Millennials from many different countries. For this reason, expect from one Greek student, we interviewed people from Italy, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Chile and Brazil. Each interview was conducted in the form of a discussion with the students and we created a short (or not so short) video for every one of these sessions, except from the interview with the Spanish student, that we could only use to create a podcast due to a technical issue with the video. On those interviews we asked the same questions as all the other teams of our class did, adding some more about instant messaging apps.
Through these interviews, we gathered much useful information, many interesting insights that we share on our articles and a microsite that we created ( https://mobileimapps.wixsite.com/website ). We have grouped our interviewees geographically and have written an article including their interviews (on video) and the insights we collected from them. Thus, you can find an article about our interviews with Millennials from Latin America and others for Southern , Northern and Western Europe.
Finally, we have written an article demonstrating the final results of our research and analysing the insights that we ended up with. This article is accompanied by a video-compilation of the most attention worthy answers we got from our interviewees.
If you found the topic of our research interesting you can continue your reading on the other articles of myself or the ones of my teammates Konstantina Nikolopoulou and elena kouki on the links below or visit our website https://mobileimapps.wixsite.com/website .
