We’re rockin’ now! As I’ve mentioned, our team in my Design Planning Workshop is working on a project on Gen Y and shopping for a major retailer. It’s getting really busy as we cruise through secondary research while digging into the lives of Gen Y through various methods, interviewing twenty-somethings as well as “extremes” like professional shoppers. A couple of weeks ago we distributed disposable cameras and journals to eleven Gen Yers and had them capture in pictures and words there shopping habits for a week.
Once the cameras and journals were collected, our team of eight divided into small groups and interviewed the research participants in their homes, asking them to walk through their photos and journal entries, discuss habits and opinions, give us a tour of their living space and so on. Today we met as an entire group and each team presented the people they interviewed to the rest of the team. We have written up personas for each person and shared those with the team, posting the pictures the participants took, as well as pictures we took during the interview, on large foam core boards.
Each interview team described the participant, and tried to bring them alive for the others. As a team talked the rest of us would write down notable habits, insights, quotes and anecdotes on Post-it notes and then would place them on the participant's board, clustering similar themes and ideas together. You can see us “in action” here.
Once this is complete we’ll start analyzing, determining dozens and dozens of insights that will then go into the Insight Matrix, an Excel Macro tool developed by our professor, Vijay Kumar, that helps visually organize similar insights into clusters that might be worth exploring further. This is one of the many tools and frameworks we’re being taught at ID that we’re using in Workshop for a real client. So cool!
The whole team is really jazzed about the project and the process. I’m learning a ton about how to uncover insights through in-depth interviews and observation, and then process these to find meaningful patterns that can help drive innovative ideas.
As a marketer, I’m accustomed to doing quantitative research that ensures we have some statistical validity as well. With these design processes though, the goal is to uncover unarticulated needs and find new ideas, and that can only be done by really getting into the user’s life and better understanding them. There’s no need, and no real use, in fielding quantitative studies at this stage. You want extreme users, extreme habits, extreme work-arounds, extreme anything because that’s where opportunity lies.
It reminds me of a quote by Ryan Matthews and Watts Wacker, who stated in Fast Company, “Deviance tells the story of every mass market ever created. What starts out weird and dangerous becomes America’s next big corporate payday. So are you looking for the next mass market idea? It’s out there … way out there.”
So that’s our Saturday. I’ll keep you posted as we move along to the next stages on this project.
Great post. Looking forward to reading about the next step!
Posted by: wakako takagi | October 13, 2007 at 11:55 PM
Nice! Sounds like a lot of fun.
Competitive Shopping and sharing ideas was one thing everyone did at a previous employer; I kinda miss those days.
Posted by: mvellandi | October 14, 2007 at 02:08 AM