Define Stage: Making Sense Out of Chaos
This past week, I learned about different ways to “define”: making sense out of the data that I collected during research.
Let me start by providing some background on my research and doing a quick summary of my findings from various customer interviews.
Background: My goal is to research customers who currently use online grocery shopping sites, or who could potentially use them, to try and understand their needs, behaviors, and pain points.
I discovered three main types of users:
Shoppers Who Enjoy the Experience — These people tend to have more time available in their day and go to the store to do grocery shopping several times a week. Things like bad weather, crowded stores, difficult parking frustrate them, but in general, they enjoy the experience and don’t see grocery shopping as a chore.
Frequent Shoppers Who See it as a Chore — These individuals tend to be busy professionals who are short on time and would rather spend what free time they have on something other than grocery shopping.
People Who Rarely Do Grocery Shopping — These people tend to be busy young professionals who only go grocery shopping a few times a year. They usually rely on take-out and eating out for their food.
Personas
The first tool I used to try and better understand the user is a persona. Personas are meant to communicate information about the user in a way that creates empathy. They are created by looking for behavioral patterns.
The persona I created below is based one of the types of users I discovered during my research: shoppers who enjoy the experience.
During my process to create this, I tried very hard to make sure that every sentence I included in the bio communicated something about the Grace’s behaviors, needs, goals, frustrations, and fears.
Empathy Map
I then moved on to create an empathy map. Empathy maps are another tool to help understand the users. They also help to organize your research and communicate the problems and mindset of the users in an easy format.
It seems there can be two ways to create empathy maps!! For this same project, I saw some people create theirs by including information on the user’s entire life in order to better understand them.
I created mine by focusing mostly on the user’s experience surrounding my research topic (grocery shopping in this case). For me, this made more sense and seemed more informative than having too broad of a focus!
In my empathy map above, you can see information on different topics from each of the user interviews that I did. I loved how after mapping everything out, I was able to easily find contradiction and tensions between the different boxes and users.
Storyboards
The last step of my “define” stage (and the one I had the most fun with☺) was creating a storyboard. Storyboards are simple narratives combined with narrative that shows a user experiencing the problem space.
They show users in context: what they are doing and where they are doing it.
For my storyboard, I focused on the second type of users that I encountered during my research: Frequent Shoppers Who See it as a Chore.
In my storyboard I tried to keep the focus on Paul’s shopping experience. I started with when he got off from work and then went on to how he got to the store and how he felt on the way there. Then, I went into lots of details of his experience while at the store, things that he liked and disliked. I finished off with some information on his journey home and a brief look on what he did after he got home. Since I am researching customers’ experiences around grocery shopping, I focused the bulk story around that!
These are just a few of the tools that you can use to help make sense of your data and present it in a way that helps others to also empathize with the user! There’s isn’t really a right or wrong way to go about it, so try to figure out what works best for you. Just remember, the goal of this stage of your design process is to craft a meaningful problem statement, a POV, on the problem that sums up the right challenge for you to address.
I’d love you hear how you create your own personas, empathy maps, and storyboards, or if there’s any other tools that you find particularly helpful. Please comment below if you’d like to share! ☺
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