4 Ways to Harvest Insights during Human-Centered Design Research
I recently gave our Scaling Org Culture class students a mini-lecture on how we harvest insights during human-centered design research. While doing my prep for the lecture, I looked around and wished to find resources that better articulate how we discover insights. Now that I have done some of that articulation, I decided to share them with the broader Medium community.
We run user research to identify who we are designing for, what problem (or opportunity) we are solving, and whether people are successfully addressing some of the issues even on a small scale (bright spots to see if we can build on top of them). This triad gives us the materials to design practical products, services, and beyond.
The connecting tissue between all the discovery work and design is insights. And insights are funny little sparks like the creatures in Miyazaki movies. They are easy to miss and hard to capture. Let's talk about insights and where they come from.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, insight is a clear, deep, and sometimes sudden understanding of a complicated problem or situation. This sudden understanding is usually characterized as an a-ha moment. These a-ha moments are magical; they shift people's perspectives, and whoever works in that team begins to see a new reality. It's like a moment when a protagonist realizes they are no longer their old selves.
How do we get to the insights? This is where research tools come in handy. There are qualitative and quantitative tools that teams leverage. Our class heavily leans on qualitative tools like interviews, fly-on-the-wall observations, and culture probes. These tools give us the materials to do synthesis. During the synthesis, we maniacally collect all kinds of evidence and look for cues, like Sherlock Holmes trying to solve a mystery.
Reflecting on where we typically harvest insights from all these different materials, I observe some discrete patterns and am intrigued by their multi-dimensionality of them. As a Sherlock Holmes in disguise, you take nothing for granted and keep your sharp eye toward many possibilities, from positives to negatives. Here are four patterns that you can leverage in your next research project.
1. Pain points
This pattern is the easiest one to recognize. As you talk to people and listen to their stories of frustration, pain, and agony, you take note of these individual instances, and they pile up to form insight. You hear much about this pattern when startup founders pitch their origin stories. When Oxo founder realized peeling an apple is a real challenge for his wife, who is suffering from arthritis, he learned how painful to use existing peelers on the market. By leveraging discovery research with design iteration, his team developed a unique bouncy handle to help his wife. This later formed the iconic Oxo products.
2. Paradoxes
Margaret Mead, one of the founding figures of anthropology, once said, "What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things." When you spot one of those moments, you find a gem. You are looking at a powerful insight sitting atop a paradox. Paradoxes are things that we implicitly try to ignore. They are two parallel realities that live together while contradicting each other. They are also robust design materials. You can take these two realities, merge them, and create a third possibility with your design solution.
For example, we once interviewed expert users responsible for a complex business process and found tedious manual work. When we were probing into their take on the process, we heard things such as "this is how our line of work operates," "we are pretty good at handling high volume of inputs," and "our people lean to their experience" The first reality was the inefficiencies of their process. The second reality was their experience and collective wisdom. These two realities live side by side but could be more helpful. You could, however, find several vital insights playing with these two together. One understanding is that offering a new tool to overcome inefficiencies can only work when the tool brings along the experts' identity.
Here's another example. When Peloton's founder John Foley reflected on people’s exercise habits, he discovered a paradox. Most people from his circles are passionate about living a healthy, active life. However, they fail to do so because they also try to be good parents, employees, and friends. There needs to be more time to do all these together. This paradox gave him insight into what if we meet people where they are so they can live an active life while trying to stay true to their other commitments. The Peloton idea was born out of this insight.
3. Onion-like Layers
When people are in the trenches of their lives and dealing with tangled situations, it's hard to see the root causes. During interviews, they might be talking about the symptoms or symptoms of symptoms. You can leverage tools like 5-Whys to get into the root cause as you speak to them. This will give you onion-like layers of issues. When you identify the layers, you can zoom in and out of those layers to see the root causes. And your insights are lying there clear as the sky.
Here's an example. During interviews, You are told that the team that you are working with has a high turnover rate. You start asking your 5-Why:
1st Why: Employees leave for better-paying jobs.
2nd Why: The company's salary and benefits packages could be more competitive.
3rd Why: The company's compensation strategy must be updated and reflect current market trends.
4th Why: The company must analyze industry benchmarks or seek employee feedback on compensation thoroughly.
5th Why: The company culture needs to prioritize employee engagement or satisfaction, leading to a need for more investment in compensation and benefits.
In this example, the root cause of the high turnover rate is not simply that employees are leaving for better-paying jobs but rather a more significant issue with the company culture and its lack of investment in employee engagement and satisfaction. Using the 5 Whys to dig deeper into the problem, you, as a researcher, can identify actionable steps to address the underlying cultural issues and reduce turnover.
4. Bright spots
Dan Heath, a best-selling author, uses the term "bright spot" to refer to a positive exception to a problem or challenge. In his book "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard," Heath describes bright spots as examples of when something is working well, even amid an overall negative situation.
Heath argues that finding and analyzing bright spots can be a powerful tool for bringing about change because it helps identify what is working and can be replicated or scaled up. Focusing on what is working rather than what is not can create momentum and build a sense of possibility and hope. When Heath refers to "bright spots," he highlights the importance of identifying and learning from positive examples to create change and solve problems.
When Airbnb founders were desperately looking for income to pay for their rent, they tried an experiment based on the idea of Couchsurfing. They put up an airbed and rented it to strangers for a design conference happening in SF. This small experiment was a bright spot that Brian Chesky and his team discovered and built their startup around.
In an organizational culture context, these bright spots could be the team members’ activities. Culture designers could take these already-happenings as a base, amplify them, and create a program around them.
These four patterns, namely pain points, paradoxes, onion layers, and bright spots, are not an exhaustive list but a good place to start harvesting insights for your projects.
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