The AEIOU framework for Design
Let’s say your office or your university, needs a campus information desk. Of course, there are hundreds of templates of how a help-desk of this kind could look like. And you could use any of these templates for the new campus information desk.
There is a problem with this however.
You see, when you realised that your campus needs an information desk, it means that problems were arising due to the lack of such a desk. The first and most important task here, is to identify those problems. This templates would give you a generalised desk, which would not be tailor-made to your case.
So, it would be no surprise then, if the problems are still not met, after the template-style desk has been installed. User research is of prime importance here.
Once you know what the problems are, you start finding efficient solutions for each of them, and incorporate all these solutions into a final design. And this becomes the first prototype, for your campus information desk.
But, it’s way easier said than done.
In this piece, we’ll look at a very important design method called AEIOU.
AEIOU basically stands for Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, and Users.
This is essentially a Framework to structure all observations you make on the field during user research. But to best understand it, let’s continue with the example of the Campus Information Desk. You would realise by now that the search for the efficient solution, is a design thinking workshop in itself.
What you could do here is to make individual worksheets for Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users, to document your research — this will give you a skeleton, to guide your field observations around. Once you have your structured research data laid out, you then converge with your team-mates onto a large worksheet, to hold all the compiled data.
Finally, it is this framework, that will help you synthesise all the data, and move onto Ideating for design solutions.
So what are these AEIOU elements after all?
Let’s say, for your campus information desk, there are of course certain goals that people will have, when reaching the desk. And to fulfil each of these goals, there would be a set of actions that the person has to perform. These are categorised as the Activities, denoted by A.
Continuing on the same example, the person approaching the desk, would be greeted by the desk and the guide at the desk itself, which is the immediate environment of the information desk, right? This is the Environment, denoted by E. It is the context — the atmosphere, in which all the activities take place.
Now that we have our environment and the actions that people are coming to accomplish at the desk, there would be communication between the person who needs information, and the person at the desk providing the information. There could also be leaflets and brochures on the desk, that the help-seeker could go through. All these are the Interactions, which is denoted by the letter I, in AEIOU.
Remember those leaflets and brochures, I mentioned a few seconds ago? Yeah, those are helpful clues, and guides for the person coming to the help desk. Those are the Objects, denoted by O. They are all the key elements of the environment. Note, that in this example, they are positive and affirming — in some cases, they could be intentionally complex too.
The last element of the framework, the Users denoted by U, is self-explanatory, right? It basically sums up the behaviours, the preferences, the roles, the relationships, and the needs, of the people who are a part of this entire system.
So this, is the AEIOU framework — and all these elements are totally dependent on each other.
Use it as a guide for any ethnographic, observational method — it will give a proper structure to your design thinking process.
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