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Usability Testing =/= User Research

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Update: I’ve edited a few parts to make it a little clearer. Same message, just easier to understand. Iteration for the win!

This could have also been titled: “Why you are doing your organization a disservice if you’re hiring researchers to only conduct usability testing, or hiring designers to do research.”

Welcome to this week’s soapbox post! 

If you’re familiar with me or my work or you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you know that I am currently in the market for a new job. I fully realize in a post-COVID world that being a researcher (while it should be one of the most important roles today for a lot of companies during turbulent times) is actually a very tough position to be in when looking for a job as it’s always one of the first cut in product development. 

I think this happens for several reason, two of which I am going to address today. 

One: A lot of job descriptions I’ve read lately are looking for UX people who are capable of conducting research and doing usability testing. While these are indeed admirable traits to have as a UXer, and I’m one of those UXers that embodies them, I would not recommend relying on your designers to do all of the research work that should be done. Why? Well, if for no other reason these are two different skillsets. Additionally, if you have an agile environment with a continuous release cycle, your designers are already too busy keeping up with that. Not to mention the fact a proper research team should be a full quarter or two ahead of them! It is difficult to encompass both of these capabilities in the same role. Research should be a full quarter or more ahead, you ask? Yes, and this brings me to my second reason. 

Two: There is a lack of understanding of what research is and how it can be useful. Usability testing (and yes it’s usability testing NOT user testing – we are testing the usability of a site not the user’s ability to use it, those are two different things and this means a lot when you get into inclusive design) is not the end all be all of user research. In fact, it is a tiny sliver and if the appropriate research has been done ahead of time in your organization, you will not need it as often and you won’t have to rely on it as much.

So let’s break that last point down. Usability testing is generally what I see organizations who are new to research using to dip their toes into the discipline. They have read and seen why it is important and think that it will make a difference for their users. This is all correct. The problem is many organizations who are new to this think that’s all there is to research and they feel they have to test every single thing before it is released. In reality, research should be more about problem finding than trying at the very end to work on testing solutions to problems that were likely not fully understood to begin with. 

If you have a research team that is versed in problem finding (utilizing generative/exploratory/discovery methods) and uses those skills to help your product people fill their gaps and blind spots, it is likely that a lot of the issues that your products or services are currently challenged with will be solved as a nice side effect when you focus on those uncovered during this phase. Why? Because, solutionizing right out of the box is how a lot of products and services find themselves in trouble. Going problem finding opens your organization up to a whole host of new possibilities and opportunities that would be otherwise missed and cause issues down the road because you didn’t know they existed.

By conducting exploratory and discovery sessions first, you’re connecting with the people in your space who are trying to solve their problems with your product or service. When you understand what those are, it makes it easy to see that they are the problems your work should be focused on. If your product or service does not solve problems for your users, it doesn’t matter how usable it is or how many features it has, it will never end up being what they are looking for. 

Additionally, the treasure trove of data your researchers will come back with during this phase will likely reveal a lot more opportunities for ideation and innovation than any single product manager will have the capacity to do. (This also helps relieve some of the pressure product managers have due to all of the other responsibilities they are saddled with in this day and age.) The added bonus is that when you use data to drive your designs from the beginning, it results in designs that have fewer hurdles to cross when it comes to usability testing because they started with a firm foundation of data to support them. 

In the end, this results in faster design, development, and testing time which equals faster time to market. This, however, ONLY works if you have a research team that is able to work well ahead of your design and development teams while at the same time also working through the design and development phases to continue advocating for the users throughout the entire product life cycle. This is why I do not recommend designers be the ones who also have to shoulder that responsibility. Yes, EVERYONE on the team should be a part of the research process, but they also have their own roles to play and the researcher is there to help make it easier, faster, and more efficient for them to do so. 

So the next time you’re writing a job description, I beg of you to keep all of this in mind. And, when you’re looking to cut – consider the amount of money a researcher can save you and make you if you truly utilize them in the right ways.

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A Hard Week

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The first I heard of COVID-19 was at the end of January. I had a team member visiting family in China. She had flown out the morning the news broke here so she was in the air when we all found out what was going on. I was worried for her safety and her safe return. None of us had any idea that the effects of it would become so much broader than the concern we had at the time for our single team member. Within 2 months everything was locked down to help slow the spread. For a research team at a hospitality company, that meant our work took a hit as well. Three months later, we find ourselves here.

image of our Hilton research banner
Tell us what you really think!

Last week was a hard week for my team at Hilton. We had hope we’d make it through, but in the end it was all for naught. I have to say, I really liked my job. I loved leading a team of amazing and brilliant researchers consisting of PhDs and Masters. They made it easy. They knew what they were doing and were able to carry out their work with no need for micromanagement (that’s not my style anyway). When problems or questions came up, they were interesting and challenging and we worked together to solve them.

At first I didn’t understand why they wanted a director with 14+ years of research experience yet was tasked with no hands-on research (even as the head of a research team at IBM, I still did a lot of heavy lifting). It was only after I started fielding actual on the job issues that it became much clearer. Though this was a different experience than the one I had at IBM where I had to build a team from scratch and then teach each of them what it meant to do research in the corporate world (much through example), I still found it worthwhile and fulfilling.

image of researchers setting up eye-tracking
Setting up eye-tracking

What was great about this team was that no one was afraid of what they had to do even if it was something completely new to them. Though we rarely worked together on the same project (they were all embedded on separate teams), when someone needed help, everyone jumped in!

For example, it is practically impossible to run an eye-tracking study alone. We spent an entire day together working out the research plan and then getting the hardware and software setup and running. It was a true team effort from researchers working on the ins and outs, to me setting up (and scavenging) the hardware and observation setup, to our research ops manager getting the eye-tracking company on the phone to help us get the software working. There was a real camaraderie where everyone was there for each other. We all wanted it to be successful and we knew we had to work together to make that happen.

The best part about my job was I felt like I really made a difference. I mean, what more can you ask for when you walk into an existing team. I focused on building up the team culture as well as the practice of research and the strengths of each individual. We worked hard to show the value we could bring and why research was important.

Image of a researcher conducting eye-tracking.
Conducting eye-tracking

We had regular 1:1s where we discussed whatever they needed to that week. We had regular team meetings where we shared knowledge and expertise and learned from each other at all levels. And, we had a bookclub where we learned with each other. We genuinely cared about each other and our work, our users, and the company.

We haven’t worked together for nearly 3 months, but we all still chat in my personal Slack where I field everything from mentoring questions to keeping up with our ongoing bookclub and now help finding jobs. We may not work together anymore, but we are still a team.

Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries book cover
Our last bookclub read

What is sad is we had only been together 5 months. We were just getting started. I had a lot of great plans for the team. We were working on building up our own research repository that met our needs and would eventually fulfill the self-service needs of those with whom we worked. My next goal was to get our own Jira board and workflow setup so that we could standardize the way we took in research requests and so that it would be easy for me and my ops partner to show data to support the work our team was doing and that we had more work than people! (This worked well for me using Git at IBM, I was really excited about getting it going at Hilton, too.)

Additionally, I was making an effort on maturing the research model within the company. This meant gradually moving it from one where design relied heavily upon a lot of usability testing to one who tested when needed, but also prioritized problem finding – looking deeper into the wants and needs of our users from our guests to our hotel staffs – so we could solve the problems that really mattered instead of just focusing on things one screen at a time. I was also working out how to create a more inclusive research and usability testing process reaching out to our recruiters and panel companies on how to do this with dignity and purpose.

At the team level, I pushed for them to be thought leaders and to find ways to share their knowledge and craft with the outside world. One of our goals was to have Hilton Research representation at as many conferences as possible. The last panel we submitted was on how brick-and-mortar businesses could go through their own digital transformations and come out the other side with some very innovative products and services (digital key and connected room were my two favorite future facing technologies we worked on).

We could have done so much. I’m so thankful for having had the opportunity to have been a part of it all. It’s rare that I’m at a job less than a year (though my last one was a year and a half, the one before that was nearly 9 years). While this one was short, it will always have a place in my heart.

Our holiday team dinner
Holiday team dinner

I know this socio-economic crisis has had a real human toll across the entire world. And for us, though we no longer have jobs, we are all physically safe and healthy. And for that, I am thankful. However, I know we all have families to support and that is very hard to do without an income. So, I am going to end this post with LinkedIn profiles of a few I know still looking for work including my own. Please feel free to forward these on to anyone needing top research talent and/or research & design leadership experience. Hilton only hired the best, so please let their loss be your gain.

Agile UX Qualitative Researchers & Usability Testers:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jadesjenkins/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikayi/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersroth/

Research Ops/Marketing Research Specialist: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-brilliant-cooperman/

Strategist, Innovator, Architect, Research & Design Leader: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianaharrelson/

(To learn more about me, check out my projects page and CV. For access to my locked portfolio and more recent work, please contact me.)

Thanks for reading.

Breakdown of a User Research Project – Part 1

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This will be a quick (well maybe not so quick) review of a user research project that was conducted in March of 2018. The designs that were tested during this and other research projects that were conducted during this time period helped the design team move forward with work that won design awards this year.

As in most cases, the research work that went into completing the designs is not something that is likely to be publicly recognized. So, I’m taking the time here to showcase one particular research project in order to shed light on the process and the effort that goes into making something like this happen. This series of posts will be a review of how we conducted, analyzed, synthesized, reported, and presented on this research to help inform both immediate design direction as well as strategic decisions.

My role for this research was the head of the research team. I designed the research study, worked with my team to conduct the sessions, and then worked with a junior researcher to analyze and synthesize the results. The junior researcher and I then worked together to writeup a results and recommendations report and we put together a presentation for leadership that we then presented to multiple levels.

Designing the Research Project

Truth be told, I was pulled into this project approximately a week before the research was to be conducted. I had very little latitude in what I could do to pull it off in such a way that it would be useful, so I did what I could with what I had. I was told we would be conducting research at our company’s annual meeting and that we would be doing so with “Inner Circle” companies. Or, those companies that paid a bit extra to see early work prior to release.

The design team originally wanted to hold a focus group, which I vetoed because given our timeline, we would not be able to recruit properly for one to be successful. (Side note: I generally dislike the group think that happens in focus groups. I find the data that comes out of them to be less useful than doing multiple individual research sessions and I would rather take the time to do it right than waste time on data that I can’t use.) Instead, I recommended that we do prototype walkthroughs with different companies who came to our three scheduled 1.5 hour sessions. Since there were four of us going, I suggested we could each take an interviewee and record the process so that it could be transcribed and analyzed later.

I provided a walkthrough procedure we were all to follow including how to set up the interview, the questions to ask, how to ask the questions, and how to probe as needed. Each interview was to take 20 to 30 minutes which meant that with the four of us we could get about 24 interviews. This is a pretty large sample size for this type of research. The thought was we could come together after each session to see what parts of the path were reviewed and then start users on separate paths during future interviews to make sure we captured data on everything possible. As long as we got 3 to 5 users to go down each path (there were 3 main paths), then we would have enough data to move forward with.

Had I been able to design the research early on, I would have gone out of may way to recruit different types of users for each path and separated each round for each path.

Prepping the Prototype

I also reviewed what we were to be doing a prototype walkthrough on and made multiple suggestions to the design team in order to make it a more successful artifact. Note: I highly recommend this for all researchers. If you’ve never conducted a prototype walkthrough before, please have someone who has done so review any work before it is put in front of a customer.

If a prototype is not prepped properly, especially a click-through one, then the user will end up getting hung-up on how the prototype works (or doesn’t) rather than the content within it. Prepping a prototype includes making sure all of the content is consistent from the colors, to the fonts, to the placements, to the images, to the interactions themselves. Even a word being misspelled will cause an issue.

This is one reason why I HIGHLY recommend doing prototype reviews on low-fidelity work. Low-fidelity work is easier to change quickly, easier to keep consistent, and easier to keep a user on-task and in the flow. Once you start adding medium or high fidelity flair, you provide more opportunities for bikeshedding.

I’m not saying not to test high-fidelity work. What I am saying is that it is better if that work has already been tested at a low-fidelity so that by the time you get to testing the hi-fi’s it should result in minimal changes and it should target very specific pieces of the hi-fi work itself and not the content, flow, or interactions. By the time you get to hi-fi, those pieces should already be vetted.

It also helps if you know the material being tested. Full disclosure, I was a designer in the space for nearly a decade prior to creating a research team and conducting this research. Additionally, I am a technical designer and researcher. I have a very technical background (from hardware support, to server administration, to web development), so not only do I very much enjoy this work, but I also have the background to be able to do it successfully. Though it is not a requirement for researchers to be super knowledgeable about what they are researching, I believe in the tech space, it certainly helps.

Conducting the Research

Me walking toward the crowd mic in hand – we got this!

Of course nothing ever goes as it is supposed to. We expected maybe a few companies to trickle in during our sessions as we were in high competition with multiple other sessions being conducted at the same time. That, and who wants to do a prototype review? Well, apparently a lot of people do.

We walked into the room where our session was to be held at 8am and found it FULL! We had over 50 people in there to start with and most stayed the entire 90 minutes. The team I arrived with started freaking out a teensy bit, so I grabbed the mic and took over. I introduced my self, what we were doing there, and then asked for a volunteer from the crowd to drive.

Thankfully, a volunteer stepped up. We put a mic on him, aimed a camera toward him and the prototype we projected on a large screen behind him, and then I led the prototyping session with everyone at the same time. Note: We recorded him, his face, and his voice with one camera and we recorded the session on the computer at the same time.

So, did this turn into a focus group? No. That was the point in having a driver. We let him take the wheel and proceeded with him leading us through his own path. As he went through, members of the audience had their own questions, too. So, I took a mic around the room and got their input as well.

The most interesting part was we had a lot of different types of people from a lot of different types of companies in the room, which meant they all had a different use case or need. Hearing one company’s use case would then prompt another company to engage with them and then state how their’s differed or resembled the previous. Having a driver allowed us to pull people back on track as needed, but we provided a bit of leeway as was necessary if the questions were relevant and had bearing on the current or future design states.

Single-user prototyping session

The second session was right after lunch and that went a lot smoother as there were much fewer participants. As they entered the room we had them sign up for a session and provided them a time slot to return. We conducted 10 individual interviews during that 90 minutes.

For these, we simply recorded the screen as they clicked around the paths that were of interest to them. What we found during these sessions was that users were looking for more of a guided tour of our product and wanted to ask technical questions on existing interfaces rather than prototyping up and coming ones.

We decided to go ahead and do the room-wide prototyping session for the third round due to the fact that it was the last of the day and it was considerably smaller than the first session. Turned out we had a lot of networking experts in the room for that one, so it was a much different conversation. Overall, we had more than enough data by the end of the day to move on to the analysis and synthesis stage. I’ll save that for part 2.

Shout Outs!

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Ahead of the conference, I want to give shout out to the three women who helped contribute to my presentation on Inclusive Design for Big Design this coming weekend. As a fully-abled person, I know that my experience and understanding is minimal when it comes to the needs, experiences, thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs of people who have to navigate a world very different from mine. With that in mind, I reached out to see if any people who were differently-abled had a story they wanted to share to help show how powerful inclusive design can be. This resulted in three interviews with three amazing women all doing what they can to help inform the rest of us about what it is like to live in a world with, stealing the phrase from Kat Holmes, mismatched experiences.

Lauren Taylor, Ms. Wheelchair Texas sitting in her wheelchair with her dog standing beside her.
Lauren Taylor and her dog Buchanan

Lauren Taylor – Ms. Wheelchair Texas 2019

Lauren was referred to me through Facebook via a mutual friend. She is a master’s student in the UNT – Department of Rehabilitation & Health Services rehabilitation counseling program and is studying to receive her license as a certified counselor. She wants to specialize in physical disabilities. Lauren was diagnosed with Congenital Muscular Dystrophy at the age of one and has been in a power chair since the age of three. In her spare time, she volunteers with Canine Companions for Independence alongside her service dog, Buchanan, by raising awareness about the necessity of service dogs and educating others on service dog fraud. Lauren works closely with UNT to make it more universally designed for all students. Her work with Classroom Support Services has enabled her to personally create desks for fixed seating classrooms that are inclusive to every student and are permanently installed, rather than a temporary and separate accommodation. She currently works at REACH, Inc. of Denton as a Youth Transition Specialist, helping youth with disabilities transition into and navigate the adult world. Her platform is Universal Design for Inclusion because of her passion to create a barrier free world where people with and without disabilities can coexist with ease. She hopes to bring the concept of universal design across Texas to businesses, schools and communities to create environments of equal benefit to all members of society. (src)

She provides a great introduction to herself and her platform in this video. Please, if you have a chance, take a look!

Svetlana Kouznetsova headshot in front of pretty pink flowers.
Svetlana Kouznetsova

Svetlana Kouznetsova

I met Svetlana back in 2012 at an Information Architecture conference in New Orleans. I found her to be charming and funny and really enjoyed the little bit of time we were able to hang out. She is an author, a speaker, and a consultant as well as the founder of Audio Accessibility, a captioning and communication access consulting firm. She wrote a book on captioning as an art form, which you can find here. She also hosted her own TEDx talk on the same topic where she explains that being inclusive accessible is not only good for people, but it is is also good for business.

You can learn more about here here: about.me/svetlanakouznetsova

Ainslee wearing glasses and a scarf.
Ainslee Hooper

Ainslee Hooper

Ainslee is a fellow anthropologist who lives in Australia that I have known for about a decade. She uses her anthropology background to consult with businesses on accessibility.

In her own words “[h]aving a lived experience of disability gives me an insight into the issues faced by people with a disability. It also gives me an insight in to some of the problems faced by disability service providers and businesses outside of the sector, in providing appropriate services. As an Anthropologist, I have the tools available to provide disability service providers, and other businesses that wish to utilise my services, access to consumer insights that will not only help improve services but will strengthen relationships between businesses, both within and outside of the disability sector, and consumers.”

She is also a power lifter who jokes that she “skipped leg day 1 too many times”.

Thank you to all of you!

I feel honored and privileged that you all took the time to work with me on this. I learned a lot from all of you and really appreciate all that you do.

End of the Semester

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In May I went to my company’s annual conference where I spoke on Design-Led Innovation and Inclusivity in Design. At the same time, my students in my Design Research Methods class were finishing their finals where they were able to show their entire research journey from generative all the way through to evaluative including tested low-fi designs! It was my first time teaching in an academic setting, so I was really interested in my evaluations. Here are a few of the comments that I enjoyed the most:

1. I really like how this course is designed so your group can work at the pace decided amongst members. I like that this is a semester-long project because I’m able to delve into the topic and become an expert on it and have hands-on experience with it instead of just listening to powerpoint lectures the entire time. I like that we have workshop classes where we can work in class.

2. Dr. Hubbard is an excellent instructor. She knows what she is talking about and I think her experience in the field, as well as her desire to see us succeed, is what makes this class so valuable. The workload is quite heavy, but I feel like I have learned a lot about what it means to be a designer. This is probably one of the best professor/ classes that ATEC offers thus far.

3. This course was great. I learned so much about user research that I am now actively engaging in pursuing this as a career.

4. This course was really stressful at times but I feel like that representative of a job of this type would feel like in the real world. I feel really prepared because of this course than most other classes I took.

81% of students strongly agreed that the course was or would be helpful. 13% agreed. 6% (1 student) strongly disagreed.
13 Students strongly agreed, 2 agreed, and 1 strongly disagreed that “This course has been (or will be) of value to me.”

I did have a single student whose opinion differed from these, but I appreciated that response all the same. Critique is important and I want to be able to fulfill the needs of all students. So, I’ll be keeping the good and making changes to account for those things that could be done better.

To that end, I am currently taking a course on how to design and teach online courses for a private university located in the North East. It has been a fantastic learning experience and I’m excited to try the things I’ve learned when I design the Masters level version of this class.

All in all, I’ve really enjoyed teaching. It is extremely fulfilling and it lets me be a part of the academic community I so miss after finishing my doctorate.

Teaching Research to Designers

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As I mentioned in my last post, I presented at a local conference in October of last year. Well, my participation in that conference led to an opportunity to teach Design Research Methods at a local university as a part of their requirements for their design tracts. I jumped at the chance to do so and I poured everything I had into the class design from November to January along side doing my day job as a blockchain design consultant.

We are now two weeks away from midterms, so I’m taking some time to reflect on the curriculum I’ve put together and what we’ve done so far. I’m taking the time to do it here, because it’s always nice to be able to look back on it later and because others may find it useful. That, and this blog has always been related to my work and my evolution as a researcher, designer, and now teacher.

To begin, I had to consider what would be some of the essential lessons designers should take from a research methods class. The designers in the class span the gamut from traditional design to graphic design, to interaction design, and more. To satisfy the needs of all and the course, I had to come up with a way to present research methodology to them in a universal way, and I had to consider the fact there were 30 people signed up for the class. So, this class has a slight interaction design focus, but the students are able to stretch beyond that if they find a way to do so within the goals and structure of the class.

Overall Class Goals

As presented in the catalog and the syllabus:

This course will explore a variety of behavioral and attitudinal design research methods. Students will walk away with an understanding of how to plan, analyze, and execute quantitative and qualitative methods, understand ethical concerns related to understanding users, and how to deliver artifacts that summarize your synthesized findings.

This course will help you to:

  • Understand how design research fits in the design process and how to apply research results to design projects
  • Describe and identify uses of various types of design research methodologies
  • Plan, manage and execute various design research methods
  • Understand ethical concerns related to design research
  • Understand how to report on research in an engaging and useful way

Class Design

My overall design is an applied one where the students learn about design methods by carrying out research projects on a universal theme. For this semester, I chose social media. I felt this was a great choice because of how ubiquitous it is, because it can be utilized in many different types of environments, and because it is not person, platform, or product dependent.

They are tackling this topic in groups of 3 to 5. Though they are working in groups, each has individual assignments that contribute to the group work in addition to working collaboratively on various assignments with their fellow group mates.

The first half of our 3 hour class time is based on discussion of the topics (not a lecture!), the second half of class they work together on their projects. The first half of their semester focuses on generative research where they interview & survey people about their social media experiences, not products. The goal of this is to understand the space and to surface problems that currently exist. The second half of the semester focuses on evaluative research where they will have to design something using their research results and then test it using various methods with live users.

Class Tools

We are using tools such as a class Slack with private group rooms, Box with private group folders, RealTimeBoard with private group boards, and a class blog where the students have access to their entire syllabus, all assignment requirements, and thorough write-ups of each class with additional materials provided as needed so they can go back and review what we discussed.

Generative Research

Because this is just a beginning research methodology course for designers, I am touching on a lot of different parts of the research process at a high level to get them familiar with them, what they are, what they are used for, why they are used, and how and when to use them. For their first assignment, we started with a Research Guide where they had to come up with a topic, assumptions, a minimum of 2 hypotheses, a minimum of 2 research questions for each, and then use all of that to create their interview script. They completed this work in class so that I could assist them as they worked through it.

Ethics

Before stepping out to conduct their first interview, all of the students had to familiarize themselves with research ethics. We touched on topics such as honesty, objectivity, integrity, carefulness, openness, respect, confidentiality, social responsibility, competence, legality, non-discrimination, and human subjects protection. Additionally, though this is just a class project, they all had to provide informed consent to their interviewees and had to have them sign a consent form. Before each and every respondent interaction, they had to explain what the study was about, that the respondent could back out at any time, that there were no right or wrong answers, and that their answers would be kept confidential. Confidentiality was preserved through the recording and transcription where no personal identifying information was gathered or used.

Interviews

They then set out to conduct their first interview with someone they knew. One of their groupmates transcribed this interview and provided a critique for improvements to take into consideration before conducting their second. They all then took the next class to reflect on their first interviews and their critiques, then updated their scripts in class as needed. They used this updated script to conduct a second interview that they then self-transcribed. The caveat for the second interview was to interview someone they did not know. To find this person, their job was to ask the first person they interviewed to recommend someone. This way they got a taste of snowball sampling. We didn’t focus on recruiting, but I did bring it up as an important part of the methodology in the field.

This process gave them a chance to get used to the idea of interviewing by first doing so with someone familiar. They were then able to take that experience and build on it before they had to try to interview someone they didn’t know. They also had the opportunity to learn how to give and take, then apply critiques. Critiquing is something we will continue to use throughout the rest of the semester as they will each critique all of their groupmates for their final and midterm and will also critique the group presentations. We will also have a full in-class critique towards the end of the semester where the students can get feedback from other groups to incorporate for their final.

Analysis & Synthesis

All of these interviews were then placed on RealTimeBoard so that they could work on inductively coding and theming collaboratively for their analysis and synthesis. They are also to take this data and create three different types of generative deliverables including personas, journey maps, and user stories. Though we are using a form of visual coding via an interactive whiteboard for this part of our research, they will be introduced to an excel method for the evaluation portion of class. This way they get a taste of both and are able to adopt in the future which ever works best for their individual needs.

Surveys & Triangulation

Throughout their analysis and synthesis process, they are to be looking out for research gaps. They are to take these gaps and formulate survey questions to help fill them. We will be doing this in class tonight. They will then use their survey and their interview data to provide triangulated results for their midterm report.

Results & Recommendations

They will then take all of this and create a Results and Recommendations report, a Creative Brief (specifically for designers), and a class presentation for their midterm. This way they take into account all of the different audiences that will have to consume their research. The goal of their presentation is to make it engaging and to tell a story. The class will have 5 minutes to ask questions and each classmate in the audience will provide a critique to the group, which will be consolidated and provided as a part of the overall midterm feedback.

Evaluative Research

Following their generative research results and recommendations report, they will all receive a set of business needs that they will have to take into consideration along with their user needs to design an experience that addresses both. This way they not only learn why to conduct research and how to do it but also how to apply it and how to deal with situations where the business needs and user needs don’t always align.

Low Fidelity Design

As a part of the short design phase, they will be creating sketches, flows, & storyboards. If their design is interaction based, they will also have to create wireframes. Otherwise, they will have to come up with a creative way to display their designed experience so that it can be tested. I’ve already received feedback about the class being too interaction design based, so we’ll see what they come up with if they decide to do something else.

Testing & Iterating

All students will be required to complete 2 usability tests/evaluations using at minimum 2 methodologies for paper prototype testing. Most of this research will be evaluative/formative in nature rather than summative or for validation as we are keeping their designs very low fidelity so they can quickly iterate for additional feedback.

Design Critiquing & Heuristic Reviews

In addition to their usability testing/evaluations each design will go through a heuristic review and a peer critique. After all testings and reviews, the students will have gone through 3 iterations and will be able to provide actionable objectives to design and development teams.

Executive Reporting

Their final presentation will be a culmination of their entire process including where they started and the path they took to reach their end design. They will have to do it in such a way that an executive would be able to walk away with what they need while at the same time everyone including project managers, designers, and anyone else working on the experience will understand what their next steps are. My hope is to bring in a few “Executives” for the final presentations to ask questions.

Readings

The best part of this class, I think, is the curated readings. Once the class is over, I’ll post a link to all of the sources they’ve been tasked with reading. Their individual homework is to read all of the weekly assigned readings and then ask 3 questions for clarification. These questions help inform our discussion for the following class. Though not all of the students have participated (and this will count off for their grade), most have and their questions have been really interesting! I’ll also post some of those and the answers. My guess is that if my students have these questions, it is likely others do as well!

Feedback

As with my students who I have provided access to feedback forms throughout the entire semester, I’m always eager and willing to take and learn from feedback. This is my first semester teaching in an academic sense, so I know there is a lot to learn from a pedagogy perspective. Please feel free to comment on this post or contact me if you have any feedback. I look forward to hearing from you!

Following your Passions

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October was a month of wonderful opportunities. My first was the ability to go to Barcelona, Spain for a Design Thinking Facilitation course. This course was different than previous ones I have attended where design thinking methodologies are introduced. It was specifically about how to lead different exercises and what makes a good facilitator with actual practice doing it. The final day was for advanced people where we focused on different skills that make a good facilitator like talking, walking, standing, and even improv. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of DT. As an anthropologist, I see a lot of things “borrowed” from my discipline and repurposed for it. That said, I think there is a time and a place to use it and it should be considered a set of tools to use rather than the end all be all of getting companies and design on the same page.

Beyond the course itself, I was able to meet a lot of people from my company in person, which was really nice as I work from home. I was able to work in a little sightseeing as well. It was a beautiful city and I am very glad I had a chance to visit it. 

After I returned from Barcelona, I was a guest lecturer at UNT on Design Anthropology. There I talked about what I do, what I don’t, my career path that got me here, and how I use anthropological skills in business and design every day. 

The following week I presented on Team Building at DFW Beyond. I will write a post about this individually with a transcript of my talk for those who are interested! 

Though these three things may seem completely separate there is in fact a link between them. All three provided me with opportunities to learn how to help people through facilitation, share how I help people through anthropology, and share how people can be helped through intentional team building. Though I have many passions, my main passion is helping others and I find myself truly lucky that I’ve found a way to do so through design, research, and even gaming. More on the last in my next post! 

GDPR, Blockchain, and Me

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I missed posting last month because a lot was happening! Of course, for everyone who is involved with technology and data at a global level, we have all been touched in some way by GDPR. I know my inbox was flooded with emails on the changes to everyone’s privacy policies and probably yours was, too. It’s worth a read to learn more about it and why it’s such a big deal and how it’s affecting businesses all over the world.

For me personally, May was a big month because I changed jobs after almost a decade at The Planet/SoftLayer + IBM where I had been a design lead for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), IAM (identity and access management), and BSS (accounts) and then head of the Strategic Insights team for Public Cloud Research (covering all of Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service). I moved from there to SAP Leonardo Services where I took the position of a Blockchain Design Consultant. This means I’ve been heads down learning all I can about Blockchain and my new company for the last 3 weeks.

Here’s where I have to have a sense of humor around these two seemingly unrelated subjects considering the paradox of Blockchain and GDPR.

To summarize the article, given the immutable state of data in a Blockchain, there is no way to update or delete it. In developer’s parlance, there is no way to perform the UD operations of basic CRUD. In fact, the entire acronym has been updated for blockchain to be CRAB (create, retrieve, append, burn). The problem is, does burn accommodate the “right to be forgotten” and “erasure of data” portions of GDPR? If personal data is in the Blockchain, then the answer is no.

That said, there is a workaround as discussed via creating a hash and a link in the Blockchain that refers back to PII (personally identifiable information) that is stored OUTSIDE of the Blockchain. This results in the PII data only being accessible through an encrypted hash and link to it provided in the Blockchain that can only be decrypted by those who have the key. To ensure the data hasn’t been tampered with, the data retrieved via the link would need to provide its own hash that can be compared with the hash in the blockchain. If the two match, the data has not been modified. This is GDPR compliant because all of the data off-chain can be deleted thus making the hash/link in the blockchain useless. However, the blockchain is then reduced to an access control mechanism to data that remains centrally owned and located rather than a decentralized encrypted transparent immutable replicated ledger of actual data that is owned by everyone.

This results in the following:

The goal of GPDR is to give citizens back the control of their personal data, whilst imposing strict rules on those hosting and processing this data, anywhere in the world. Also, one of the things GDPR states is that data should be erasable. Since throwing away your encryption keys is not the same as ‘erasure of data, GDPR prohibits us from storing personal data on a blockchain level. Thereby losing the ability to enhance control of your own personal data.

If you want to learn more about Blockchain, I recommend this handy product manager’s guide and this how blockchain works article.

As you can see, I may have sipped a bit of the Blockchain Kool-aid.

On top of all of those changes, I also finished a side hustle where I completely redesigned a billing system for a friend’s startup.

In the coming months, I’ll be posting more about Blockchain along with some Machine Learning, IoT, as well as other forms of AI from a user and design perspective along with my ever-present posts on the Internet, privacy, security, gaming, and social media. I imagine the various topics will merge at some point down the line. I’m excited to be here in the edge technologies space. It’s exactly what I told my circle of friends I wanted to work on at the turn of the year. Thank you to SAP for making that a reality.

Attention grabbing headline here

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Two headlines recently made the news. The first was the World Health Organization’s consideration of adding “Gaming Disorder” to their International Classification of Diseases. The second was how our mobile devices are making us stupid. Both of these have more in common than you might think. What gaming has that makes it addictive is often utilized by the same dark patterns that power much of today’s social media interactions. Most notably, interactions that cause dopamine responses. The problem with these artificial (aka computer-mediated) interactions providing a dopamine release is that if you lack in-person interactions that are the biological basis for dopamine responses, you’ll turn to artificial ones to supplement them.

When artificial interactions work better, faster, and easier than organic ones at providing a dopamine high, they might induce a person to engage in an addictive relationship with the artificial interaction at the expense of an organic one. In layman’s terms, this may cause a person to have problems in their daily life due to their detrimental relationship with technology. For example, a person may forgo an in-person interaction to engage in an artificial one because they find the artificial one more compelling. These may start out as situations like skipping out on going to dinner with friends to instead engage in synthetic interactions but may escalate to neglecting essential responsibilities such as going to work or school.

The real question is, is the subject matter that induces the dopamine response to blame for the addictive relationship that is developed or is the environment where the person cannot find organic interactions that would produce such natural and beneficial reactions responsible for the resulting addiction of looking for them elsewhere? Careful consideration should be made here as people who are diagnosed with an addiction to a particular trigger are thus restricted from engaging with that trigger in the future. What would this mean in situations where grade-school students are diagnosed with gaming disorder and are thus unable to do their school work because their school utilizes game theory and electronics in much of their teaching? What happens when someone recklessly engages in social media and thus is forced to give it up, but must interact in a similar environment for their careers such as utilizing tools like Slack or office Intranets?

Questions for consideration:

Should the underlying cause of addiction not be of more concern than those places to which people look to supplement their natural human needs? What can be done as designers and researchers in these areas to bring possible addictive behaviors to the attention of the user before they go too far? Are businesses at risk of losing revenue by putting the customer’s behavior and mental, physical, emotional health first? Should they be responsible when a user becomes addicted? If so, to what end?

Tetris Therapy

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Ars Technica reports on research that tested the use of playing a game of Tetris to reduce addiction.

“The researchers again hypothesized that the game’s ability to seize visual and spatial processing in the brain is key to the health benefits. In this case, addiction and cravings are often driven by visual fantasies of having that drink, drug, or what-have-you, the authors explained.”

Biocomputers

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Science reports on how bioengineers have turned cells into biocomputers.

“Computer hardware is getting a softer side. A research team has come up with a way of genetically engineering the DNA of mammalian cells to carry out complex computations, in effect turning the cells into biocomputers. The group hasn’t put those modified cells to work in useful ways yet, but down the road researchers hope the new programming techniques will help improve everything from cancer therapy to on-demand tissues that can replace worn-out body parts.”

First Round of Results from my Dissertation Research

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Here are a few stats from my research on parents and video games copied directly from my dissertation. This post will be the first of several where I talk about my ethnography and the results of my study.

Research Participants
There were 46 total participants in 30 interviews representing 26 households. As defined in Chapter One, a household represents parents who participated alone as well as those who participated together (in the same interview or separately). This singular unit was created to avoid inflation of the numbers where two parents were talking about their shared children and home environments, as that would skew the numbers against those where only one parent participated. Of the participants, 11 were children and 35 were parents. The 35 parents represented 39 qualifying children in total including the 11 who contributed. Of the 35 participating parents, 18 were mothers and 17 were fathers. The parents spanned in ages from 25 to 55. The youngest child participant was 4 and the oldest was 16.

This study afforded opportunities for additional analyses, given the rich qualitative data collected throughout the interviews. Each section below provides this additional information as a way to give context to the research participants and better understand their relationship with video games.

Video Games
Over 200 games were mentioned throughout the course of the interviews, not including the various versions of multiple game franchises. The top three most mentioned games were Minecraft (85% of households), followed by Grand Theft Auto (65%), and then World of Warcraft (42%). Almost two-thirds (64%) of the 39 children played M-rated games and over three-quarters (77%) played T-rated games. None of the children in the study were old enough to purchase M-rated games and only 31% of the 39 children were old enough to purchase T-rated games.

Video Game Devices
Participants played console, computer, and mobile/tablet games equally (88%). Handheld games (58%), followed by web-based (38%), and then educational (35%) rounded out the list. Over three quarters of all 26 households (77%) used some sort of cloud gaming services such as Steam, Origin, Xbox Live, or PlayStation Network. All households downloaded games digitally, whereas only about three-quarters (77%) still bought physical game media.

Video Game Spaces
The majority of game spaces (58%) were publicly shared spaces with the family. Very few (8% of all households) had completely private spaces where stationary devices such as computer towers or consoles were located in children’s rooms. The remaining households (35%) had mixed game spaces due to the use of portable electronics such as laptops, handhelds, and mobile/tablet devices. The majority of households (69%) had some sort of time restrictions placed on video game play; however, less than half of them (39%) considered them to be strict rules.

Parental Assessment
An overwhelming majority of the 26 households (92%) performed some sort of assessment on video games before their children were allowed to play them. Almost all of the 26 households (92%) discussed video game content with their children, and most (85%) stated they knew their children to self-regulate and/or they trusted their children to only play the games of which they knew their parents approved.

Parental Involvement
Almost three-quarters of the 26 households (73%) watched their children play video games and many (69%) played video games with their children. Over half (54%) of the 26 households allowed their children access to the Internet to either play online video games such as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG i.e., World of Warcraft) which can only be played online, or to play standard multiplayer video games with others online.

You can read about the key findings here. Answers to my specific research questions will be in a different post.

*Mic Check* Let’s see if this thing still works…

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So, my last post was in February, and there is a very good reason for that. That was the month I got my IRB approval for my dissertation research and the same month my husband left for a nine-month tour in Korea. So, here I’ve been working full-time, being a full-time mom and working on my dissertation.

The working title for my information science dissertation so far is Understanding Parental Information Behavior in Assessing Video Game Content for their Children: An Ethnographic Study. I’ll be using ethnographic methods similar to the ones I used for my Masters thesis including both in-person and virtual semi-structured interviews with parents, an online survey, and observing parents shopping for video games. You can learn more about it at ResearchingVideoGames.

I’m currently analyzing my interviews and will be seeking approval IRB approval for my survey as the fall semester begins. If you are a parent of a child who plays video games and is between the ages of 4 and 17, feel free to email me at researchingvideogames [@] gmail in order to be notified when the survey becomes available. As a parent, you don’t have to be a gamer to participate.

I shall now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcasts!

Qualitative Remote User Research

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Following on the heels of last weeks post on my UX Pyramid, I thought I’d talk more about the methods one can use to produce the information that would be used to create the deliverables mentioned in it.

I am an anthropologist first and foremost, so being able to use my anthropological methods in user research is important to me. This particular method uses journaling as a means to gain insights into what the user actually does in the system by having the user document what they do when they do it rather than trying to run them through various fabricated scenarios that we as designers might come up with. This allows us to really see the application (this could be software, games, mobile apps etc.) from their perspective rather than trying to force our perspective on them.

As a part of this process, we ask the user to not only document what they are doing, but also to provide screen shots and any other collateral that might be of note (such as information about another site that may do what they want in a better way).

With the information gathered in the journaling portion of the study, we are then able to provide the users with access to new tools or scenarios we are working on that they may be interested in using. This way we get better feedback as these are parts of the system these particular users actually use.

This research then allows for the segmentation of the user base not only by the type of user they are, but also by the way they use the system and the parts of the application they use the most. All of which provides ample information for personas, concepts, process flows, story boards, and wireframes.

Qualitative Remote Research
Qualitative Remote Research

Internet Gaming brought to a halt by DDOS

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Several gaming news outlets are reporting on the recent gaming outages brought on by a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack (PCGamer, Joystiq, VentureBeat | GamesBeat) perpetrated by a group calling themselves Lizard Squad. This all came to a head when the SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) President’s plane was diverted due to a bomb threat made by the same group claiming responsibility for the DDOS attacks (Gamespot, Polygon).

I’ll be following this story and making updates on it as it progresses since the FBI is now involved due to the nature of the bomb threat.

Games that were affected by the attack are as follows:
Blizzard.net games including World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Starcraft, Hearthstone
Sony Online Entertainment including Play Station Network
League of Legends
Path of Exile

Were you affected by the outage? Feel free to comment or contact me to let me know about your experience.

The Subversiveness of Elvis Presley

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“Communist authorities equally understood Elvis’s subversive manner, even as an Army private.When it was announced that Presley was bound for the U.S. base at Friedberg, the East German Communist Party accused the United States of plotting to undermine the morals of Red youth,’ Karal Ann Marling relates. ‘To show that this act of provocation would not be tolerated, party boss Walter Ulbricht ordered the arrest and imprisonment of fifteen teenagers who marched through the streets of Leipzig in 1959 shouting, ‘Long live Elvis Presley!’” (p. 268)

Cohen, R. D. (1997). The delinquents: Censorship and youth culture in recent US history. History of Education Quarterly, 37(3), 251-270.

What is your attention being diverted from?

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“Rather than simply forbidding young people to listen to certain forms of music, read certain books, or see certain movies, many families have abdicated this responsibility to civic action groups and the government. Such a relinquishment of authority over individual lives has led to denunciations of various media forms, calls for self-regulation of individual mediums, and attempts to ban completely some sexually explicit speech.” (791)

”Perhaps even more important than the right of Americans to decide what they wish to read, see, and hear for themselves is the fact that this generation’s purity crusade is diverting national attention away from more important areas. Indeed, many individuals who believe in a government based on popular participation have not yet realized that by devoting so much energy to what is essentially the private business of American citizens, their attention has been successfully diverted from participation in the political and economic planning processes of the nation.” (850)

Interesting that if you consider gaming, specifically violent video games, to be the topic at hand, these conclusions are as relevant today as they were over 20 years ago.

Blanchard, M. A. (1991). American Urge to Censor: Freedom of Expression Versus the Desire to Sanitize Society—From Anthony Comstock to 2 Live Crew, The Wm. & Mary L. Rev., 33, 741.

 

So, about that dissertation thing

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Well, being a PhD candidate means one thing and one thing only – now I have to write a dissertation. While yes I knew this was the next stage in the journey, I am not sure I am adequately prepared. I know that seems silly, I mean I have written a Master’s thesis and all. This one just seems (and is!) so much bigger and more daunting. I’m one of those people where the more daunting something seems the harder it is for me to get going on it. However, once I get going I’m usually FULL STEAM AHEAD! 

Now to just figure out how to get going. One thing I’ve tried so far is to buy a few books on the subject of dissertation writing. Since this particular piece of writing is more traditional than say my past ethnographies, I really have to figure out the ins and outs of it and what is expected of me. While I’m sure there is likely some dissertation writing class offered by the university, I am not local and therefore cannot take advantage of that.

So, this means I need to educate myself on it.

Here are the books I bought:

  1. Writing a Successful Thesis or Dissertation: Tips and Strategies for Students in the Social and Behavioral Sciences 
  2. How To Tame Your PhD (Thesis Whisperer Books)
  3. Authoring a PhD: How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Thesis or Dissertation (Palgrave Study Skills)

So far book 1 reads more like I textbook than I would like, but I’ll muddle my way through it anyway.

Book 2 seems good, but it has a lot of weird typo issues on the Kindle edition.

Book 3 I have yet to start. I’ll at least finish book 2 first before I try. Book 1 may take a little longer.

My goal is to have these finished by the end of September as I’d like to try to have my first three chapters written by the end of November so that I can defend my topic before the ends of this semester and hopefully get my IRB application submitted and turned in at the start of Spring (if not just before). This has to be done soon in order for me to start my research portion in January and hopefully be finished with the physical research aspect by end of February. Then analyze the rest of spring and into summer when I hope to finish and then start writing by fall to submit my first draft by the end of that semester or by the beginning of Spring 2015.

My goal is to graduate May/15. I’ll have finished my phd in 5 years if I can do that. That doesn’t seem so bad in my book. Especially given that I have a full time job and twins!

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