Speed Dating (Research Method)
What is the research method?
Speed dating, much like the romantic version of its term, involves presenting many potential ideas to a target audience without being married to any single one (pun painfully intended). Speed dating allows a design and/or research team to receive feedback at an early stage of ideation before too much time, money, and manpower is spent on a solution that actually misses the mark in terms of user needs. The method has some nuance in presenting users to new ideas, namely the use of storyboards and user enactments to identify gaps in each idea.
When is it typically used?
Speed dating is used in the early stage of a design project, when ideas and creativity are at an all-time high. At this stage, designers are often ideating using personal experience and limited primary and secondary research as a guiding direction, but do not know if users will behave and react exactly the way they predict. Having a group of potential users to expose storyboards and ideas to can clear up this uncertainty and redirect a team’s identified user needs.
Who is involved and in what capacity?
A team of researchers will invite a potential user group to participate with them in a speed dating research activity, with the researchers presenting ideas and the potential users giving reactions and feedback to the team. The group of potential users serves as a representation of the target audience as a whole; in this way the “entire user base” is involved in a projected fashion.
How is it done?
Speed dating research comes after preliminary findings from interviews, diary studies, and other primary and secondary research. In preparation for the chosen user group, the researchers will create storyboards that roughly lay out a design opportunity and how a user/users would interact with said idea. These storyboards are meant to be very general overviews for eliciting reactions, not necessarily for explaining specific features.
In the speed dating event, these storyboards are presented to a target research group, who rank the storyboards by how useful they perceive them to be. The research group and researchers can then communicate about uncertainties throughout the storyboards, refine narratives, and consider other solutions.
Why would designers use it?
This method is useful for testing a wide array of ideas, in a preliminary stage, directly towards a target audience. Often, there are user needs and unexpected moments that a design team may overlook when ideating. Speed dating should not be used to rank different ideas; rather, it is more useful to correct these overlooked aspects during the ideation process to better guide the team towards more suitable and refined solutions.
As an example, in 2007, an HCI team studying user interactions in smart homes used speed dating to examine over a hundred different concepts and tens of refined concepts over the span of a few weeks’ time. They are accredited as one of the first teams to utilize this method and achieve noticeable results.
