Orientation Takeaways
Top Three Takeaways from Orientation:
The value of crafting good interview questions
Idea-generation process
Field testing the prototype
Good Interview Questions
One of the biggest takeaways for me this week was learning and understanding the value of crafting good interview questions. In retrospect, I think some of the questions could have been phrased differently or changed altogether. For example, we asked one question related to how people spend their time outside of work. Their answers often led to details about the people they spent time with, which was our next question, so I wish we would have prepared a different question in its place. While sometimes the prepared questions may not be asked because the interview goes in another direction, the questions asked are the foundation for the remainder of the design process. I sometimes found myself asking “but why?” as I re-read utterances that I transcribed. I wanted more information from the data collected that I perhaps could have learned in two ways: by preparing the right questions and then following up to the person’s answer with additional questions that bring out more of their story. This, in turn, made identifying themes a bit more difficult leading to additional challenges in generating insights. With a growth mindset and repetition, I hope to improve the craft of writing interview questions that uncover those latent needs while building empathy with the participants.
Idea Generation
While the task to create 300 ideas seemed (and often was) daunting, I understand why we were asked to do it and why designers do it. If my group had a bit more time, I probably would have spent additional time crafting better (and more provocative) insights to create juicier ideas, but the practice of quantity over quality of ideas was beneficial. My partner and I time-blocked eight minutes per insight to generate as many ideas as we could. It was a good practice for me to write anything that came to mind, not bringing any of my own judgement about the idea before writing it down. Then we briefly shared our favorite ideas before moving onto the next insight. In a perfect world, we would have spent more time listening to one another’s ideas to spark new ideas. The idea we ended up using was actually an idea that we both had written down, although there were some nuances that made each idea different. Looking back, strong ideas are probably not the ones that both people come up separately.
Testing the Prototype
I found a lot of value in the prototyping and testing phase. As we developed it, we were reminded of other concepts that existed in others spaces, so how could we stand out? And how could we make it easy enough to use to break through all of the other noise and competing priorities on a computer screen? Emiliano helped us identify the value proposition of the idea, which made me realize that there are tweaks that you can make or a story you can tell to make many ideas valuable and meaningful in a space (at least at this phase). In testing, one healthcare worker said she would spend the 30 seconds it takes to thank a coworker. She said one reason people are getting burnt out is that they feel like they are not making a difference, but that there are so many things that they have to remember to do. She preferred being prompted with a “would you like to send a coworker a thank you?” instead of needing to remember to go and do it. She suggested a prompt once a day to ask, and that it have settings to change the notification intervals. The testing process stressed the importance of getting feedback early and often.
