First Published in UX MAG on October 24, 2017 http://bit.ly/2DpRsz6

Information technology is changing the way we perceive brands, do business, and conduct our everyday lives.

Millions of interactions are recorded, tracked and analyzed. This is seen in the great array of places and the channels through which information is expressed — examined, interpreted, and communicated. And the surge of data-tracking technologies has significantly shaped how we interact with information, and is gradually redefining how we experience the world around us – as individuals and as a community.

Indeed, data permeates everything — from our bodies, homes, and work culture, to our city’s infrastructure and urban spaces. It gives people and businesses, small and large, the insight they need to effect meaningful change.

Being a designer today often always implies working closely with organizations to empower them with ways of understanding their present and imagining better futures. We now have the unique opportunity, as designers, to operate between strategy and creative practices to influence, not only brand perception, but also habits and rituals across many environments, devices, and channels.

DATA PERMEATES THE EVERYDAY

People are buying VALUE, not stuff

Data connects people and businesses to the world of information. It tells us as much about who we are as it does about the world around us. And data analysis is slowly becoming the channel through which we learn about our human condition and tackle the challenges and unknowns of the day.

Things make us just as much as we make things.
Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, 2013

As more objects and concepts become computable, or digitally-enabled, so our workplaces and consumer culture itself have adopted web- and app-first strategies.

The human body, for example, has long been a point of investigation for the healthcare and fashion industries. They have embraced the challenge of studying how it works, what conditions affect it, and how to influence behavioral and attitudinal patterns. Apps and wearable technologies have enabled people to more accurately monitor and quantify their actions by gaining granular insight about their behaviors. By providing data transparency, they encourage people to form opinions, reach a state of clarity and awareness, and develop new rituals to counter unhealthy habits with healthier ones to further develop ourselves. It motivates them to understand contextual variables, set goals for themselves and undertake them.

On a city wide scale, information interacts with infrastructure, systems, and people. In 2016, Uber, for example, unveiled Uber Movement, the open-source data-sharing platform that enables people and organizations to learn from data generated by riders and drivers, in order to help improve their cities’ urban efficiency. The crossover of urban planning and transportation analytics makes it possible to understand urban dynamics. It helps inform the future of urban mobility, the movement’s ambition to optimize existing infrastructures and to contribute to the growth and health of cities.

Data provides a new lens through which to understand and critique our worlds. On the one hand, learning from data has empowered individuals to connect to their communities and cities on a different level. And on the other hand, the rising data-tracking culture has equipped individuals with unprecedented tools and mechanisms of self-awareness.

DATA FUELS BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Businesses are investing in selling VALUE, not stuff

Analyzing data plays a key role for businesses in identifying operational strengths and weaknesses. Insights from data enquiry can point out opportunities to boost performance and efficiency — where digital brand strategies and business capabilities fail to address customer needs, revenue targets, and market expectations.

In the past, big data had led changes in analytics in the financial and IT sectors. But today it is vital that businesses across all sectors apply analytics to understand how their organization performs and learn from their customers’ behavior.

In healthcare and retail, for example, there is greater awareness that data analytics can transform the way businesses operate and interact with their customers, online or offline. Business change that is led by data analytics has been demonstrated to have significant impact on business processes and customer loyalty.

With over 20 years’ experience in software development and consulting, SoftServe has transformed the way global organizations operate through its innovations in big data, the internet of things (IoT), security and experience design. According to their June 2016 Big Data Analytics Report, 45% of organizations use big data analytics across their operations. To illustrate, here are two examples:

OBH Sense 360 created by Outcomes Based Healthcare (OBH) uses data from built-in smartphone sensors to measure patient-reported outcomes in people with diabetes. The app recognizes that when people are sick or unhappy, they interact differently with their devices. So OBH combines data analytics and behavioral science to gather patient insight, and that places OBH as an industry leader in health-outcome analytics.

Boston-based Yottaa provides intelligence that enables website owners to understand the dynamics of their visitors, across geographies, any cyber-security threats the user experience, and the security landscape. With the aid of a real-time log analytics and data visualization tool, Yottaa enables customers and technical teams to quickly visualize and resolve anomalies across their application.

What this hints at is that listening carefully to data can enable brands to understand their failures and optimize their strategies and customer experiences. The economic, environmental, social, and technological forces that are driving ubiquitous data-collection today, encourage organizations to find new ways to address their service gaps and inefficiencies and explore new possible avenues for partnership and brand value expansion.

DATA BREEDS CULTURAL CHANGE

Businesses adopt flexible and changeable strategies

Data seems to be everywhere and in everything. It helps us connect to the world around us and with one another.

In business, however, data analytics gives organizations the ability to uncover opportunities for improvement and expansion. With the systemic analysis of data, businesses are learning about themselves in ways that were impossible before. And accordingly, evidence-based change is at the core of how businesses evolve, driving market opportunity and business transformation.

Amazon is a prime example of continuous business re-invention, by turning their business into a multi-billion dollars online retail store since launching as an online book store in 1995. Over the years, many transformations have led to the company evolving and reaching wider audiences. To name a few key events, the company began by expanding its product offering to selling everything from A to Z with Marketplace, a third-party seller business. It then entered the services industry with the launch of Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing platform, and diversified their strategy to include grocery shopping from local specialty stores through Amazon Fresh. With Kindle Fire (2011), Amazon’s own tablet computer, it has also opened new avenues for the brand to be perceived as a leader in the e-reader space.

In most recent years, the Amazon Echo (2014) voice-activated device for the home has grown in popularity, and is evolving to provide an additional communication channel for brands across diverse industries. For example, FinancialForce’s CTO, Andy Fawcett, and Sales Force MVP, Kevin Roberts, suggest that information technologies, like Alexa, will have a significant impact on the way businesses engage with people in the future. In fact, voice-activation is speculated to be the new business tool to interface with customers and integrate with many brands schemes and devices within the home – such as: lights, switches and thermostats control, music, and news.

Nearly every business faces the challenge of maintaining heritage and tradition while meeting today’s technical, social and economic demands. By leveraging insights from their data, businesses can reimagine how they position their brands amongst their competition while accommodating the growing cultural need for data transparency. As a result, businesses today are more prepared to transform and willing to introduce incremental changes to their operations. To this end, embrace current trends and adopt flexible and changeable strategies.

EVERYTHING IS COMPUTABLE.

In sum, everything that we engage with digitally is now data-generative.

As individuals, technology increasingly dictates our experiences of culture, as we learn to navigate our information spaces and adopt new platforms and communication channels. And with data, mediated through our devices and environments, is brought about new knowledge and a changed relationship to places, people, and brands.

As designers, we tirelessly investigate the hidden causes of business inefficiencies and customer discontent to guide the development of purposeful and adaptable digital services that elevate a brand’s image. This explains why today, design practice is not solely concerned with addressing customers’ growing needs and fundamental frustrations, but is also equally engaged in delivering true business value.

Data everywhere has shifted once again our expectations of technology. It allows us to push the boundaries of what can be known and what is meaningful, and to persevere in our exploration of what can be done with data and what can be learnt from it.

First Published in UX MAG on April 8, 2016 http://bit.ly/1SsOlS0

In a world where almost everything is digitized, services can now be understood as concepts with infinite potential to grow and transform. What was once unimaginable now lies within the expected.

And because concepts have the multi-dimensional flexibility for infinite semantic relationships, powerful service partnerships are beginning to emerge that are able to better respond to changes in customer needs, desires and expectations. The delightful ‘Of course!’ moment often reveals itself through these service combinations, giving new meaning to the services that we use.

‘BISOCIATION’

The term ‘bisociation’, first coined by Arthur Koestler, entered the design world in 1984 as Victor Papanek borrowed the concept and applied it to address sustainable design challenges. He used it as part of his design practice, as both a method to create innovative and sustainable products by bridging disparate (local) materials together as well as a problem-solving and ideation tool.

Think of ‘bisociation’ as when your kitchen runs scarce on ingredients and you begin to experiment with what you have in order to create new food combinations. Sometimes the combination upsets you, other times it’s not ideal but you put up with it anyway, and on some occasions the combination is so ideal that you now have to have these ingredients together.

Similarly, service ‘bisociations’ across industry types play a pioneering role in redefining the core values of services, causing an instant shift in mindset and in so doing, fostering new customer demands, different modes of doing and thinking, and growing expectations for future services.

SERVICE MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

When Facebook began its plethora of platform and service acquisitions – from the popular photo app Instagram and the facial recognition platform Face.com in 2012, to the mobile instant messaging app ‘WhatsApp’ and the Finnish fitness tracking app ‘Moves’ in 2014 – it sought to add valued features to its service offerings. These combinations have enhanced Facebook’s facial recognition capabilities, enabled the pictorial documentation of Instagram users’ lives to blend with their existing Facebook timelines, and extending its reach into the healthcare industry by adding tracking capabilities to its toolkit. Through combinations, Facebook is able to grasp what encapsulates the elements of an individual’s self-curated profile. These kinds of ‘bisociations’ have enabled Facebook to cater to the multi-faceted needs of its customer base.

Travel booking services, too, are increasingly partnering with trusted rating systems, such as TripAdvisor, to increase reliability in their service offering and provide best-in-class recommendations. In fact, a few of these travel agencies have gone a step further to craft itineraries that include restaurant reservations. For example, Priceline acquired the restaurant booking service OpenTable in 2014. This bisociation blended two business ideas together to expand their business area to also include restaurant bookings from a worldwide trusted inventory.

SERVICE & PROJECT PARTNERSHIPS

The ‘Of course’ moment of service partnerships goes something like this: Of course, I should be able to listen to my Spotify playlist while riding in the back of an Uber; and Of course, I should be able to split my Uber fare with a friend with a single tap. Through service partnerships, Uber is disrupting customer expectations. For instance, Uber partnered with Zomato (the restaurant booking app) to cater to its Indian market, by allowing Zomato users to book a ride as they book a table at a local restaurant. By combining actions to respond to an anticipated need (getting a ride to the restaurant), the two companies made it convenient for diners to plan their evening and get there on time.

In healthcare technology, the ‘bisociation’ of services has proven to have a particularly positive impact on patients’ daily lives. Fjord Accenture Interactive formed a proof-of-concept that wearable technology can help people manage difficult health conditions, such as ALS, using brain commands to interact with display interfaces, and communicate with others. Similarly, Emotiv partnered with Philips to look into the future of healthcare for ALS patients. Brain commands are connected to available products and services in the patient’s environment such as: light switches, TV controls, email, and medical help. Service combinations of this nature are proving that digital services can genuinely improve and affect the quality of our lives.

SERVICE INTEGRATION ECONOMY

Creating ‘synergies’ between services is part of a growing trend at Fjord called ‘atomization’, where businesses and organizations are beginning to open up their API(s) and allowing services to share data across industries to inform more reliable offerings and exceed customer expectations. The trend is a response to the increasingly liquid expectations of consumers, where products and services are expected to blend with the digital service landscape they operate in and complement consumers’ complex and evolving needs.

Service ‘bisociations’ are becoming essential ingredients to our ways of living and making sense of our digital environments. Combined, services can create powerful new meaning and value. And as services take on multi-faceted characteristics, they now require a more sophisticated language to express all that they can offer.

Of course!

“UX dept” is used to represent the gap between a product’s ideal user experience and its actually quality. The expression gives life to that gap and provides designers a language for perceiving and evaluating the real state and quality of UX experience in terms of the 4 emotional measures: functional, reliable, usable, and pleasurable. According to Aarron Walter’s “Hierarchy of User Needs,” which follows Maslow’s framework of Hierarchy of (Human) Needs, the functional measure lives at the lowest level of the quality axis and supports the increasingly qualitative measures: reliable, usable, and pleasurable; the latter sitting at the top of the pyramid denoting the ideal, target or “peak” experience.

This notion is interesting to me because it gives me a quality matrix to place my work against and aim for when designing a user experience. It seems the work delivered in UX focusses more on the first 3 floors of the pyramid, often sacrificing the best quality defining measure; the pleasurable. For the author of the article, Andrew Walter, “UX dept” only takes place when designers think an experience can or should be better. It is the result of “cutting corners” and making fast constraint-based decisions to the detriment of a pleasurable and best user experience.

— source: http://bit.ly/18UoFHL

As clients are becoming increasingly aware of ethnographic-ish research being an essential and integral part of the design process for a high quality user experience offer, it is important for us (designers) to learn an appropriate format for approaching and customizing research on a project basis.

Frog’s Research Learning Spiral, as David Sherwin names it in A Five-Step Process for Conducting User Research, allows us to think of research as not only a set of insight-focused methodologies and collaborative practices, but also very much so as a process of articulating and defining the focus area and scope of the research itself through its 5 learning stages: Objectives, Hypotheses, Methods, Conduct, and Synthesis.

I would like to focus on the the 3 early stages of the spiral. These are fundamental in situating the research area and addressing design questions with methodologies geared towards feeding our knowledge lexicon of people and things in their habitual contexts according to pre-defined objectives and hypotheses.

1 • Objectives focus on the framing of questions following the 3 Ws and an H structure: Who What When Where Why and How. These together help us define who the demographic user base is, what activities they might be involved in while using our service or product, when they would be engaged in such activities, where these activities would take place, under which emotional or rational states (why), and using which processes. These questions are in turn reformulated into simple statements of research objectives, which outline the scope of the research effort.

2 • Hypotheses are assumption packed opinions or suppositions we have about a product or service, its users, and the contextual settings in which the product acts, which are meant to be tested and challenged. Sherwin lists 3 types of hypotheses: attitude (what users would like to get out of a service), behavior (what users would like to do with the service), and feature (which feature users would most enjoy using).

3 • Methods — such as contextual enquiry, surveys, interviews, and benchmarking — can help prove or disprove these hypotheses by revealing key data about a demographic user, their contextual environments, and identify leverage points wherein design can affect their everyday and provide positive change or support. Other more participatory activities which involve probing users — such as diary studies, card sorting, and paper prototyping — can serve as experiential idea generating methods with a capacity for drawing design solutions and concepts that meet the user’s needs and mental models. Finally, evaluative methods — such as usability testing, heuristic evaluations, and cognitive walkthroughs — will demonstrate whether these ideas are effective, useful, and desirable.

[F]inding meaning in your data […] can mean reading between the lines and not taking a quote or something observed at face value. The why behind a piece of data is always more important than the what.” — Lauren Serota, Associate Creative Director at Frog Design

According to Sherwin, data tells us what and when users do things, but not why. Context is in fact king. Integrating such framework for user research helps provide us with the contextual understanding — the understanding of given demographics’ everydayness — for making more informed design decisions.

I am particularly interested in the name “learning spiral”: a looping process that doesn’t need to be lengthy, costly, and a unique event. It is spiral and has the potential of being a cyclical and iterative process, which can be applied as needed at different stages of a design process and with a different scope. That spiral from which I can learn allows me to investigate more specific areas of my users’ everyday by defining learning objectives.

While every research endeavour has a plan and objectives, i particularly found this interpretation because it gives importance to the planning and framing of research and integrates objectives definition as part of the research itself. Typically research seems to begin with contextual inquiry and interviewing right away as a recourse to inform the design approach and concept which does not necessarily end up being a solution that is desirable. Involving research participants in the framing of the research seems to be a more inclusive and humane approach that is bound to have a worthwhile and desirable quality.

— source: http://bit.ly/1eCoUyH

Ethnographic research is important when interaction designers start raising questions about the core values and place that technological tools have in people’s everyday practices. The methods used for understanding user behavioral patterns and cultural realities focus on interaction as inseparable from the environment in which it occurs. Rather than analyzing separate data points, ethnography restores actions within their contextual settings and examines behavior as part of a holistic system in which people, things, and the environment affect each other and intertwine with one another.

Ethnography in UCD

Ethnography can take multiple forms including: participant observation, contextual interviewing, and participant self-documentation; which touch upon the contextual, emotional, and behavioral layers of user-specific practices. (Payne, 2011) Through data collection and analysis, designers are better equipped at identifying leverage points wherein remodeled or novel products or services can have an effective place in users’ everyday lives.

On November 12, 2011, in an IxDA NYC workshop entitled “Ethnography and User Experience”, presenter John Payne, Experience Designer and co-founder at Moment Design, discussed how the application of ethnographic methodologies within design practices effectively uncovers user behavior and belief in situ, in turn influencing and reshaping a designer’s vision and intent. To demonstrate this research approach to design practice, the workshop included a 1 hour fieldwork in the, then, hype of Occupy Wall Street, for which the attendees were split into teams of 5. Each team listed their assumptions about the living conditions as well as the beliefs and goals of the OWS movement. Teams then collectively formulated questions that needed answers before arriving at the site. With 4 research methods laid out by Payne for the exercise – observe physical/digital traces, collect a cultural inventory, observe environmental behavior, and conduct semi-structured interviews – team members assumed the roles of facilitator, photographer/videographer, note-taker, and scout.

The results of the fieldwork proved to be successful in inspiring the attendees as they discovered how their assumptions about their hypothetical “users” – the OWS people– were either conflicting with and/or limited to what they had over/heard and read elsewhere. This exercise required that participants collaborate and set aside their traditional and comforting research practices. Each team presented their findings through storytelling and highlighted specific challenge/opportunity spaces wherein design can have an effective impact. They proved with the inevitably qualitative data that emerged from their observations and encounters that users are heterogeneous and carry varied perceptions, goals, and behaviors. Rather than generalizing users based on assumptions, ethnographic research helps understand heterogeneity and the patterns of behavior that links a people together. This new collective knowledge offers designers the potential to create hospitable and adequate experiences for users.

Digital Ethnography

To prove this approach applicable to everyday design practice, Payne ended the workshop with an introduction to digital ethnography, also known as Digital Ethno (Masten, 2003:76), which consists of traditional ethnographic processes enhanced by participant engagement through the use of digital products and services already preexisting in their daily lives (Rhea, 2006:19). This method invites participants to contribute to research which helps researchers transcend a priori knowledge they might have had about users by highlighting digitally recorded instances of user/consumer behavior in situ and over time (Rhea, 2006:21). Through the use of both traditional and digital ethnographic methods, research teams can access intimate aspects of people’s lives in ways that traditional methods alone can not.

While traditional ethnography entails observation and analysis, digital ethnography enables researchers to capture real-time situated data. While traditional ethnography is the immersive practice which once belonged solely to the realm of sociological research, ethnographic practices in a wider sense have become part of designers and marketers’ vocabulary and processes for identifying context-sensitive user patterns of behavior. This merging of practices (ethnographic research with design) has proven to be a rich source for innovation and empathic design.

Digital ethnography enables designers to identify gaps in users’ lives for which innovation can be fruitful, and opportunities wherein design can make an appropriate and effective impact. This method engages and encourages participants to contribute to the research at hand, making them co-authors of the creative process. The practice exploits the wireless network as an opportunistic space for documenting cultural patterns of behavior over time (Masten, 2003:77).

With the use of digital ethnography, accounts are externalized events in users’ lives that help explain and analyze reflexively the social nature of contextual behaviors and patterns; those in turn indicate possible opportunities for innovation that either complements, transforms, or enhances users’ relationships to their environments, to contextual events, and/or to objects. Ethnographic practices add value to the design process and incentive, and to the products and services which emanate from the understanding of user behavioral needs.

Cultural Probes

Cultural Probes (Gaver, 1999) are tools concerned with gathering evocative responses from participants in order to understand people in new ways and to reach their intimate behaviors and idiosyncratic thoughts.

Probes are both tools for research and vehicles for collecting data about the local culture of a given user group, that engage participants in self-documenting their everyday. Probes are positioned as essential ingredients to experimental design processes that are responsive and centered around the cultural understanding of participants. Examples of probes take the form of picture taking, self-mapping, postcard questionnaires, digital memo-taking, etc. making “the strange familiar and the familiar strange” (Gaver, 2004).

As probes collectively reflect informal and intimate data about users, they provide an understanding of the local culture and an insight into what sort of design interventions can add pleasure to users’ lives. The probes focus on the implication of innovation within local cultural settings and the experiential ideas that may emerge within this new knowledge-base.

The probes are aimed at driving new understandings of technology through speculative design. Speculative design extends the notion of design practices to include questions concerning the function of designed objects, the experiences that they provide, and the cultural context in which they occur. Probes are particularly interesting in data as inspirational. Varied facets of culture serve as inspirations for the design of new kinds of pleasures embodied within ambiguous, unfamiliar, and playful objects and experiences.

With challenging users through probing, designers can identify new opportunities wherein speculative design can enact a new understanding of everyday life through interacting with pleasurable technologies.

A final note

Design Anthropologist Chritina Wasson, in 2000 explains how ethnographic research in user-centered design is employed to better understand ‘how users do things and use products’ and what role technology serves in users’ work, play, or educational practices (2000:380-1). Ethnography made as part of the design process reveals what Wasson calls “a new dimension of the user.” This dimension recalibrates designers’ preconceptions about a given user group by guiding the design process and informing the emergence of intuitive ideas for UCD solutions and experiences.

source:
Gaver, W., Dunne, T., and Pacenti, E. (1999). “Cultural Probes.” Interactions, January/ February, pp. 21-29.
Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., and Walker, B. (2004). “Cultural Probes and the value of uncertainty.” Interactions, Volume XI.5, pp. 53-56.
Masten, D., Plowman, T. (2003). “Digital ethnography: The next wave in understanding the consumer experience.” Design Management Journal, Vol. 14, No.2
Payne, John (2011). “Ethnography and User Experience.” IxDA NYC.
Rhea, D., and Leckie, L. (2006). “Digital Ethnography: Sparking Brilliant Innovation.” Innovation Summer 2006, pp. 19-21.
Wasson, Christina (2000). “Ethnography in the Field of Design.” Human Organizations, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 377-388.