Product Delivery Cycle

mediayarn:

Interesting visualization of Agile development…Go Scrum!

So I’m reading this book…

I’m currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” on my commute right now, and thought this was funnily relevant - 

“Each day for 30 consecutive days I attempted to make something creative. I hoped to force myself into making quick decisions, creating things instinctively. You can find below an index of all 30 Days in the Speed Creating project linked to all the day’s pages. For more information about the project visit this page.”

“Speed Creating” by Dominic Willcox

Working without over analysis. Blink itself is interesting, although I’m not sure I’m picking up as much as I should by reading it on the tube. Early on in the book there’s a passage about the height of a person having influence (subconsciously) on our career success, and appropriateness to run the world. Thank you god, for I am 6”3. The most interesting thing I have taken from it so far is essentially an understanding of “thin slicing”- the ability (and accuracy of doing so) to absorb the key elements in a situation to then make an analysis, conclusion etc, kind of like an intuition for what I’d just call a feel for something.  I need to read more of it, though.

On Gaver and the cultural probe…

With time on my hands, I’ve been doing a bit of reading. I’m still hot for user interaction design. But I have questions…

Now, I don’t claim to be an experienced user researcher, far from it, but from my experience I struggle to understand this point, with regards to the cultural probe:

“Well… I think it depends on what you mean by interpreting. We don’t analyse the data, so we don’t do some of the things that I might have done when I was a psychologist, like count up the number of people who give certain types of replies or even the number of responses, nor do we try to use the replies to generate personas, because after all we’ve got real people that we’re dealing with. And we don’t really do scenarios in that context because, again, we’ve got real returns from real people. We don’t need to kind of re-present them. They are what they are, and what I find too is that it’s nice to work with the… raw materials because they force you to re-interpret them pretty much every time you look at them. … If you do the kind of traditional job of analysis, what you’re doing is interpreting your results and coming up with a new representation of what you found, and the tendency is then to design to that representation rather then to the actual data, and in a sense that puts you at a remove from the people that you were using as inspiration for your design. So we tend to just live with the results of the probes that we’ve got and leave them around and kind of use them in new combinations and new ways; find new meanings for them; sometimes just pick out one or two that are particularly striking and allow things to be a bit more flexible, a bit more loose.” Bill Gaver @ InfoDesign 2007

During my final year, working on Subtle Subtitles, and my dissertation, I explored using different research techniques for the first time. The simpler the better, and I know there are things I would have changed, but to me, analysis is still key to the process. Following diaries kept by people with Cerebellar Ataxia, I did quote the results in explaining my thoughts in my dissertation. Admittedly I didn’t compare them directly, but the resulting analysis does so, inevitably. With my postcard packs, which I do loosely refer to as cultural probes (their original intention was that the cards were to be sent to the user’s homes, and used in the way they thought most appropriate, but time constraints meant that a focus group set up with loose, but directional exercises made more sense) I felt it important that I present the information gathered in a more understandable, not necessarily conclusive, but definitely organised manner. Much of my work, as I think should be true of any designer, involves presenting my findings, my work, my inspiration, reasoning… basically a lot of presenting… and I couldn’t physically show postcards with scribbles on them, as that wouldn’t justify well, anything.

The exercises involved with the postcards were non-directional, I didn’t explain what I was looking for or anything, but then compared and learnt from the results anyway. The design outcome is a result of all of this, which in turn is a product of an interim presentation stage, which inevitably represents this research in a style or shape that differs from the original research. Right? 

Maybe my disagreement is because my probes were dissected. I had plans of using photography, postcards and diaries to collate my information over months, but that isn’t practical, especially when my project was not research alone - it involved development, prototyping, concept to final design; on my own. Research was ongoing, part of my agile development I guess, but not an end. In industry, from my experience, the research we do does need to have some tangibility. You’re being paid, therefore you need something to show for it. Cultural Probes should reveal something of the inner workings of the user, their motivations etc. Much like as an actor we study a script inside out, learn about the character’s motivations, the reason he acts the way he does, speaks the way he does, argues, cries, walks, jumps and runs. Cultural Probes, to me, are a technique that ought to be used to write the user’s script. Commercially, a lot of my work has involved user case scenarios, user journeys, storyboarding. A script. 

It definitely depends on the environment of work. I spat some of my results into graphs, not for myself, but to demonstrate you know, hey, I’ve actually done some real research here - the danger of saying that direct analysis / re-presenting isn’t needed is that, research can go unused, or not live to it’s full potential; so when we do arrive at the point when we need to develop user personas, if we are to rely on being inspired, they probably aren’t going to be as in depth as if we, to begin with, take the results as directly influential to the persona (yes, a re-presentation.) Then again, as I did the research first hand myself, and the design (talking about Subtle Subtitles) I was influenced by the more floaty information gained just by meeting a broad user group, which is back to Gaver’s point of allowing the probes to be used in “new combinations and new ways; find more meanings for them”.

I’ve got a lot to learn, but I’m enjoying this.