A Weird Research Method That Worked!
Overview
When a user researcher does research to support a product, design or operations team, the requirement is always to take a scientific & systematic approach to understanding the problem at hand.
But come on, human behaviour is completely irrational and illogical at times, so your run-of-the mill common research methods won’t work. I had to get creative while I tried to understand Rapido users and went a little out of the box to dive deeper into their attitudes and behavioural tendencies.
So now what did I do, you ask?
Well, I made my research study participants play with hand puppets and called that research method Katputtli.
Let me dissect how it happened and how I played with scientific theories to manipulate them into a fun research method that gave me a beautiful insight into the human mind.
How did it all begin?
I wanted to understand user’s commute habits in conjunction with their morning habits.
For people who don’t know; morning habits play an important role in determining the rest of the day’s routine and consequent habit formation.
In simple words, mornings implicitly dictate how users make choices for commute and how their preferences change over time.
What was the problem?
The usual user interviews or focus group discussions could not bring the rich details of a user’s daily habits and routine.
The common verbatims I heard were like, “I get up in the morning around 8, around 9am I take my bike and go to the office”. The usual narration lacked vivid scenes and lacklustre of their habits
Now how is this boring narrative going to help Rapido in understanding the service consideration- levers and blockers?! It won’t.
This what led me to create a new research method that could bring a user’s latent thought and actions into a more conscious realm for better verbalising of their habit patterns and commute choice behaviours.
The Science Behind It:
Let’s learn some foundational understanding of Human Mind.
Theory of mind corresponds to the ability to attribute thoughts and feelings to oneself and others. This ability allows us to predict the behaviour of others through the attribution of mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions.
The theory of mind has been divided by social cognitive neurosciences into two main sub-components:
- Cognitive theory of mind, referring to beliefs, thoughts and intentions.
- Affective theory of mind referring to emotions and feelings.
The primary objective of Katputtli was to unearth both the cognitive and affective states of Rapido users into truly understanding how the interplay of emotions and thoughts influence one’s habit patterns. Once I uncover these true habit patterns, I would be able to predict their preferences towards Rapido services or other forms of commute like Metro, Personal bike etc.
These predictions then would help the business teams cater the product and service which is more suited to Rapido users and non-users alike.
Secondly, I figured that the Gestalt therapy model does the best work in dissecting and integrating the cognitive and affective states of human behaviour.
The term “gestalt” is derived from a German word that means “whole” or “put together.” Gestalt therapy was developed in the 1940s and 1950s by Fritz Perls, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and his wife.
Their foundational premise is that people are best thought of as whole entities consisting of body, mind, and emotions and are best understood when viewed through their own eyes.
Pay attention to the phrase, “viewed through the own eyes”
How did that get applied to a Research method?
So, for me to uncover the latent, not-so conscious thoughts of my user’s daily habit cycles, I asked my participants to talk about their daily morning habits like a ventriloquist with their hand puppets.
- This pushed my research participants to see themselves in 3rd person and talk about their thought and emotions disassociated from their true selves.
- In this way, they can verbalise and become more aware of their thoughts and actions of their daily morning habits and also help me analyse how their thought patterns and behaviors may be blocking/aiding their commute preferences.
Some Neuro-scientific evidence maybe?
Gestalt therapy with processes that occur in relationships between people, treating them not as a subject-object, but as a subject-subject, which fully corresponds to the neurobiological studies of the human brain.
- Mirror neurons play a role in the subconscious dialogue of sensory communication — communication at the preverbal level of feelings (unconscious) and physical sensations (conscious) that arise in the bodies of people who are in contact (a person being in contact with themselves).
- The medial pre-frontal cortex of the brain regulates emotions clearly allowing a person to disassociate between their thoughts and emotions, leading to more clarity of verbalising their unconscious attitudes & behaviours.
THUS,
This is how a weird research method of talking with puppets gave deeper insights into human behaviour and commute preference formation triggers that helped in improving Rapido Auto and Bike taxi service consideration by varying commuters.
