JTBD for Health by Justin Sinclair meetup wrap-up
Last Monday saw a great crowd of almost 30 people turn up at Brain Mates to hear Justin Sinclair of Neo speak about a health case study at the JTBD Sydney Meetup.
Jobs to be Done Sydney #4 Interview workshop
Monday 23rd March was the fourth installment of the Sydney chapter of the Jobs to be Done meetup, and the first co-organised by me. That’s right, after so many years of attending meetups I’ve finally stepped up to help Christian keep the ball rolling. As always we were wonderfully and generously hosted by Brainmates who also host and sponsor Product Mavens and Product Talks Sydney. I’ll be getting along to one of those very soon.
Design research #4: What is design research data?
Are you recording enough after customer research encounters?
Noting behaviours, attitudes, and context during research encounters uncovers rich findings and helps to tell compelling customer stories. Just recounting what was said misses important data.
Deconstructing a Jobs to be Done switch interview
It’s fascinating to hear about the decision making process of customers when they decide to buy a product. Its more interesting still to think about the reasons they may be leaving another product for this to happen. What may on the surface seem perfectly rationale ends up being haphazard, circumstantial, and even highly emotional.
Jobs to be Done Sydney meet-up review
I’ve been meaning for the longest time to do some reading on Jobs to be Done framework, but like so many little jobs it had remain undone. Until Monday night that is when Christian Lafrance organised the first Sydney meet up at the Trinity Bar in Surry Hills. Christian has presented on Jobs to be Done at UX New Zealand with ABC colleagues Justin Sinclair and Raymond van der Zalm and he has been incorporating the method into UX and product strategy and design projects at the ABC.
An entire design approach laid out
There are some great UX/UCD resources online — my favourites to date have been Service Design Tools and more recently UX Mastery. But today I was knocked out by the phenomenal effort to define and encapsulate design research activities in a cohesive project framework. It was all revealed by a rather innocuous tweet that did not quite foretell the brilliance ahead.
Design research #3: Don’t ask why
While I was a student I worked in retail. At one store we were encouraged (forgive me if you hate sales assistants) to ask open questions to invite conversation. It’s harder that it sounds. Years later while being trained in user research we were encouraged to ask why. Not only why, but as many whys as we could … and you know why … to get to the root cause, that deep fundamental driver of behaviour. Of course this too is not as easy as it sounds. Unless you’re a charming 5 year old asking why can sound pretty obnoxious and being asked why can make anyone feel quite defensive. I’m guessing advice like this has its roots in the famous 5 Whys, which I take to be a tool of analysis, not a script. If you disagree with anything here, or have more to add please say so in the comments.
Design research #2: 10 questions to debrief after an inquiry
I recently read IDEO’s HCD toolkit and it reminded me of the instruction offered in Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion, which I have written about before. If you do any type of UX research, particularly observational research, but have not had formal research training I think you will find them both worthwhile reads. This is my summary of advice from both these texts on debriefing after a contextual inquiry.
Design research #1: Recording field research
I have a BUNCH of notes from books and articles I have read on design research. I had reason to revisit them all recently when I was writing a training course and thought to share them as a set of reference tools for others, you dear reader, and as a memory boost for me on our next field trip.
Design research bible
Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion
was recommended to me in 2007, I finally got round to reading it in 2010 and the other day I revisited the copious notes I took. This is a book about ethnography, research, projects and design. But why write a blog post that is a book review? Particular when the subject is essentially a text book?
Sebastian Chan on Museums for the Next Generation Part 2: Do tag lists get unwieldy over time?
I first saw Sebastian Chan speak at Web Direction on 2007. He presented on social tagging (“folksonomy”) projects at the Powerhouse museum. The first of these projects was the digitisation of electronic fabric swatches. After that the entire collection was digitised and published available for public classification. Recently I saw him present and got an update on these projects.
The Dos and Don’ts of Diary Studies
This blog post is about diary studies and how to go about conducting them.
Mappiness: the ultimate diary studies project
Thanks to Bec for introducing me to Mappiness and this video. Should be interesting for anyone who has run a diary studies project.
Getting people to talk
I came across this video today made in 2008 by students from the IIT Institute of Design. It introduces design research and contextual inquiry and demonstrates what not to do when interviewing people. If your keen for tips on what makes or breaks a research session, its well worth watching.