Personal Brainstorming: Exploring people’s experiences

These books have been gathering dust for quite a while now.

Mini-Challenge 2

Ordinarily, we would engage with people representative of those who will be using the system we are designing and proposing. In this instance, we have taken a different approach.

Method: Exploring personal experiences

Firstly, we delved into our own personal experiences that are related to the challenge facing the SLV. Then we sought to change the circumstances of that experience to speculate how what that experience might be for someone else.

Awais’s exploration started with his own recent experience of wanting to use a digital resource by adding annotations to help him with his research. His alternative scenario explored the experience from the perspective of a time-poor professional with limited engagement with current technology that might be used by a library.

Trevor recalled his own recent experiences as a mature-aged student returning to study after many years working as a high school teacher. He then explored what the experience might be for a single mother with three children trying to use the resources provided by the library to help her children with their school work.

I stepped back many years into the time when I was at High School and my experiences using the local city council library with my peers. I then speculated on what that experience might be like for me in the future if I was living with dementia.

We took the time to document these experiences and speculations in some detail as we needed the rich information that would normally be provided by an interview aimed at obtaining a user story — a detailed story of a specific experience.

Our analysis of the experiences we documented involved identifying insights using prompting questions and then mapping them onto our existing map of the challenges and problem domain. There were certainly areas of consistency but also some new issues emerged.

Analysis: Identifying insights

From these scenarios, we then identified insights into those experiences and the values and needs the experiences are based in. Conducting this type of analysis risks our own internal biases and filters limiting the insights that we identify. So we used prompting questions to guide our analysis. These questions were:

• What is most interesting?
• What is most surprising?
• What is most mundane?
• What blames technology?
• What doesn’t fit into any of the above?

Analysis: Mapping

Each of these insights was written onto a separate card and these were then mapped onto our existing organic map of the problem space. This mapping enabled us to identify areas of the experiences we had documented that was not already touched on through our review of the brief or the literature. It also allowed us to see where there was consistency between the experiences we had documented and our existing map.

Key Results

The consistency between the challenges identified by SLV and those we identified from our documented experiences.

There was a lot of consistency between the experiences we documented and the challenges that SLV had identified.

Some of our experiences related to issues with finding information. These were based in the past where technology was not really available to help us find information. However, our projected experiences reflected that we thought that this continues to be an issue at the moment.

Something that is emerging is the need to be able to use these resources in creative ways. This has been identified by SLV as a key challenge.

Another area of consistency was in the issue of making the resources available to society as a whole — recognising that society is far from homogenous and that it is important for all of society to be able to benefit from the resources held by a library.

Society is made up of many different types of people. Everyone should be able to access the resources held by a library.

Using this information

The process of exploring experiences allowed us to add further detail to our mapping and the themes that we had distilled from that mapping. It provided verification but also identified holes — things that we also need to consider as we continue with our design process.

In our next step, ideation, we used the themes we had identified as design directions. The detail within those themes was used to create areas of focus, constraints and to identify particular types of people. These were then used to facilitate idea generation. It seems counter intuitive to add in things that limit thinking when you are trying to be creative. But our experience has been the opposite. More about this in our next process post.