At Cooper’s UX Boot Camp, held between March 25th and March 28th at Monkey Ranch in Petaluma, CA, Fair Trade USA looked to participants for ideas around how to raise awareness of their mission and inspire consumers to purchase Fair Trade products.

Fair Trade USA enables sustainable development and community empowerment by cultivating a more equitable global trade model through certifying and promoting Fair Trade products. Their work benefits everyone from farmers and workers to consumers, industry and the environment, and yet only 20-30 percent of Americans even know what Fair Trade means. Why? The issues are complex, but as students dug into this problem they identified key factors behind this disconnect, including a lack of brand awareness of the business case for Fair Trade, low brand adoption, and limited Fair Trade product presence in stores.

From those explorations, the following goals emerged:

• Motivate and inspire brands to adopt and evangelize Fair Trade practices.
• Put more Fair Trade products in front of consumers.
• Build “pop culture” awareness of Fair Trade to get more brands to buy into the movement.

To get there, student teams went beyond the initial concept of a website redesign and took on the bigger questions that lead to business transformation. For a look behind the scenes as the teams approached this challenge, check out the following video filmed during the Fair Trade USA Boot Camp, and read more to take a look at the Fair Trade USA ecosystem model and what the students came up with in the pitch decks that follow.

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OneNote is, as you've seen in the prior posts (OneNote for Interaction Designers and OneNote for Interaction Designers: the Nuts and Bolts, awesome for design meetings. But it's also useful in research and client presentations, too.

How we use it in research

[From the video, slightly edited:] Having a laptop open in a research interview puts a barrier between you and the person you're interviewing, and the typing can be quite distracting and intimidating for the interviewee. But typed notes are searchable, making for very useful reference when you’re synthesizing your notes. OneNote is a nice compromise. With a Tablet in slate mode, we remove the physical barrier of the laptop, and as long as you have the pen in a “Create Handwriting” mode, you can later go back and search your notes as if they were typed. (The handwriting recognition is pretty amazing.)
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by Cooper Interaction Designers: Patrick Keenan and Nate Clinton

The most exciting trend we've seen in the business world has been an eagerness to rediscover customers as people with interests, habits, and complex lives. In the burgeoning startup world tools have been created to help with customer discovery, or product market fit. In the corporate world, executives are rolling up their sleeves, paying attention, and using design thinking. Even seasoned non-profits are going beyond awareness campaigns and seeking to understand their advocates’ behavior.

One of the seminal thinkers on this kind of discovery is Clayton Christensen. Here he recounts an incident showing how an insight was lost on the sharpest of marketers:

After watching the clip, it is clear that the fast food company was talking to their customers, but they were just asking the wrong questions. Bringing them into one-way mirrored rooms and asking them, "what can we do to make our milkshakes better?" wasn’t working. The hero of the story (the user researcher) is observing customers, collecting data and looking for patterns, not just asking questions.

What distinguishes the hero from the fast food company in the story is:

1. He observes customers’ behavior in context, something the company didn't think to note
2. He asked the customers questions about what they do and why, as opposed to asking about the milkshake.

This is a great illustration of an incredibly subtle point. In user research interviews, some companies are tempted to ask "what features do you want in this product?" rather than trying to understand what these customers are hiring the product to do.

The investigator in the story is able to grok which attributes are on the rise (viscosity) and which have reached their peak (chunkiness); something that's near impossible to get at by asking about feature directly. In the end, he knows why different consumers are hiring milkshakes and can move forward building more desirable products for them.

UX design is fundamentally about solving problems. We call a design "good" if it solves a problem elegantly, cheaply, usably, and so on. I think it's fair to say, though, that too little attention is paid to which problems need solving, which questions need answering. The interaction design practicum at Cooper U offers a slew of tools for solving design problems, but the really eye-opening parts of the course taught me to back up a step and think about how to find the right problem in the first place.

Over-focusing on design solutions is natural. Solving the problem is the fun part of the job, after all. Smart workflows, elegant wireframes, typographical brilliance, beautiful gradients, and clever CSS are the exciting materializations of great design thinking. Talking to people outside the organization is time-consuming and expensive, so intuition often substitutes for user research. But, as Cooper U hammered home, successful user-centered design has to mean more than relying on stale or imagined assumptions about the people to whom our design solutions ultimately matter.

A lot of design begins with someone asking "What do users want?" The temptation is then to go ask some users what they want. This frequently leads in the wrong direction; too often people don't know how to articulate what they want. A "disruptive" product is precisely that: something people didn't realize they wanted until they saw it, disrupting what they imagine to be possible.

A better question is to ask is: "What do users do?" This is where user research comes in. Users have ingrained mental models, habits, rituals, and idiosyncrasies. Finding the patterns is key to finding the right problems to solve.

At Cooper U, we practiced observing and describing and interviewing and categorizing users. Here's what I learned: useful user research is difficult, draining, and requires practice. You can't just wing it. It takes planning, persistence, and the right methods.

In these past months, I've done real-world user research for a number of design projects. Every researcher develops their own style, but the good ones are tireless recorders and observers. They let the real world they witness seep in and reveal the behavioral patterns in real people. Only then do they try to figure out what users want, and crystalize these patterns and desires into personas. They ask the right questions, then solve the right problems.

Get some

Stop designing before asking the right questions. Design things users want. If you want to up your user research game and bring new user-centered design skills to your practice and organization, check out one of our upcoming Cooper U courses.

• Interaction Design, San Francisco, CA - Sept. 11-14, 2012
• UX Boot Camp, Petaluma, CA - Oct. 8-11, 2012
• Interaction Design, San Francisco, CA - Nov. 6-9, 2012
• Interaction Design, Sydney, Australia - Dec. 3-6, 2012

Design research has been a key component of most of the projects I've been involved with at Cooper. Since it adds time and cost, sometimes we have to go to great lengths to convince clients to include research in a project. But design research isn't just about giving the design and product team a leg up on understanding user goals and needs. It's also about minimizing business risk and validating—or challenging—the current strategy. Typically, the insights we gain by talking with and observing users help our clients look at their business goals through a different lens. In addition to providing necessary input for designing successful products and services, this new perspective helps them make better decisions about the long-term trajectory of their product roadmap and approach. For some products and companies, it can be even more transformative, as the insights they gain help them re-imagine not only how to design and deliver better products, but also how to better structure their internal organization to do so.

Of course, companies can only make these kind of strategic pivots if they have the appropriate decision-makers engaged in the initiative, with time set aside in their decision-making process for integrating the input that may come out of user research. I've found that the business executives who treat design initiatives as a strategic endeavor and not just a tactical execution of product definition get much more value for their design dollar.

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It’s rare, but it sometimes happens. You will be in an interview and you hear something that doesn’t quite ring true. Knowing the warning signs and what to do in these edge cases will help you make course corrections during the interview so that it is still useful.

Screen capture from Rock Star Games' title L.A. Noire

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Have you ever used a public service that understood your needs? We all have horror stories of waiting in seemingly endless lines at the DMV or hunting forever to find the information we need on poorly designed city websites. Who is making sure that government uses effective design and technology to meet the needs of citizens in the 21st century?

Introducing Code for America

Code for America is a brand new non-profit that is taking on this challenge. And part of the challenge is understanding the target users of the technology. To help in that effort, Suzy Thompson and I taught a day-long workshop on Research for UX Design to the fellows at Code for America.

Code for America signage at their offices in San Francisco, autographed by the 2011 fellows

Code for America helps local city governments leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory. Built on a model similar to Teach for America, CfA encourages developers and designers to apply for a year-long fellowship, during which they will create open-source technology solutions for city governments. Out of over 300 applicants, CfA chose 20 fellows for their inaugural year, from a wide variety of backgrounds including Web 2.0 startup entrepreneurs, developers for local city governments and school districts, open source contributors, a researcher for the New York Times, a digital journalist, an intellectual property lawyer/programmer, and a museum exhibit designer.

Code for America 2011 fellows (image used by permission from Code for America)

Code for America Institute

The fellows are spending the month of January in San Francisco at the Code for America Institute, learning from guest speakers about a wide variety of topics, including treating government as a platform (Tim O'Reilly), building local communities (Danielle Morrill), being a change agent and nurturing social network communities (Caterina Fake), and taking an entrepreneurial view of their city projects (Eric Ries).

Host City Projects

Each of the fellows is assigned to one of four city teams, each with a target project:

The fellows will spend the month of February in their host cities, learning about the IT infrastructure and interviewing city stakeholders and users of their system. They will return to San Francisco in March to design and develop the open-source applications. They will present and hand-off the applications to their host cities in the fall.

Cooper Training

Because Cooper has extensive experience connecting user research to product design, Code for America asked us to come in and present a one-day workshop. From our courses on interaction design and design communication, we carved out a day's worth of materials on finding stakeholders and users, preparing an interview instrument, conducting interviews, debriefing interviews, and synthesizing and presenting research findings. We also gave them a look-ahead to personas, scenarios, and framework design.

The fellows got a chance to plan an interview instrument and conduct a 45-minute interview with members of the CfA staff. Conducting good ethnographic interviews takes practice -- I think the fellows came out of our workshop with a sense of confidence in talking to their city stakeholders and application users in February. I look forward to hearing about what they learn about their users, and to helping them create personas and scenarios from their findings. And I can't wait to see the amazing applications that result from their work.

Great Government Research and Design

A question to our readers: Where have you seen user experience design principles applied to government applications or services, to achieve an amazing outcome? At Cooper, we're currently working on a project with CalSTRS (California State Teachers' Retirement System), and in the past have done pro bono work with the SF Department of Health. I have also read about fellow Cooperista Renna Al-Yassini's service design work for the Roudha Center in Qatar. What user experience design work in the government or social service sectors has impressed or inspired you?

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I recently had the opportunity to return to a place I hadn't been for quite some time--the principal's office. My last project included interviewing 11-17 year olds about their homework habits, and I needed a hall pass from the secretary. In preparing for the interviews, it occured to me that I hadn't spoken to many 'tweens since I was one myself. Would they call me Mister? Ask to trade Bakugan? And the high school kids--would they be too cool to talk to me, answering every question with nothing but a yes, no, or dismissive smirk?

As it turns out, interviewing school-aged children isn't too different from interviewing adults. But as I learned, there are a few do's and don'ts you might do well to keep in mind.

Have an adult introduce you to the child
Allow a parent, teacher, or guardian to make initial introductions. This establishes your credibility to the child and communicates the adult's consent for conducting the interview.

Treat kids like regular people (that is, like adults)
Kids can tell if you're being patronizing and will adjust their own behavior accordingly. Treat them as you would any interviewee, thanking them for their time and explaining what they should expect from the session.

Interact with them at eye level, but don't get too close
Minimize physical power dynamics by sitting in a chair or kneeling alongside kids when you conduct the interview. At the same time, be aware of their personal space and don't give them a chance to feel vulnerable or uncomfortable with your presence.

Be specific with your questions
Kids tend to be quite literal in adult conversations, so be direct with the questions you ask and the responses you give. Don't be surprised when you point to a toolbar and say "what do you think these do?" and the response is "save saves, print prints, open opens, and delete deletes."

Avoid technical and professional lingo
You've picked up a career's worth of acronyms and jargon that your interviewee will not be familiar with. Also, look for the words kids use to describe things, and use those both in your interviews and when designing for your young audience.

Don't ever take pictures or video without parental permission
There are many legal and ethical issues around photographing and videoing minors, and if you don't have a clear need for it, don't bother. If you do ask, be prepared to take no for an answer without any further discussion. Put parents/guardians at ease with things like "we only use these internally for reference" and "don't worry, this won't end up online or on TV." When appropriate, set up your video to capture the session without recording the child's face, for example by training the camera on the screen when discussing software.

Don't crack jokes or be sarcastic
Kids won't be prepared for casual joking, for as much as you work to set up a peer relationship they are still talking to an unknown adult. Jokes will often be misinterpreted as serious comments. As an example, I was running a feedback session with a powerpoint deck that ended with a blank screen. When one child clicked past the last prototype slide and into the blank screen, I remarked "OH! You broke it!" then spent the rest of the interview making him feel better that he hadn't just busted our computer.

Recognize when an interview isn't going well and finish it quickly
This happens with adults too, but sometimes you'll get a kid who just isn't able to converse with you. Spend a minute or so looking for an opening, and if you can't break through, let them out of their misery and end the interview quickly. Don't abort it or say it's not working, just ask a few easy, obvious questions, thank them for their participation, and move on.

What else?
I'd love to hear more about other people's experiences interviewing children and involving them in user feedback sessions. What advice do you have?

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Here’s a quick tip for you as you conduct your goal-directed interviews with users and potential users: Leave a four-second pause after your interviewee pauses their response, allowing them to add more information or additional detail.

This is hard to do. In ordinary conversation, people will often step in and fill these silences. Especially with a stranger, we don’t want to leave the conversation “hanging,” preferring instead to offer up some response or reflection on what the other has said.

But an interview is not a cocktail conversation. The interviewer is trying to get as complete a picture as he or she can of the user’s thoughts. To help do this, we want to give them that room to think about what they’ve just said and append as necessary.

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