Week 1: Part 3— User interviews, survey results and Empathy Maps
A documentation of my time spent on the 8-week User Experience course in London
This post is a continuation of Week 1: Part 2 — Understanding our users. I decided to split up my research posts as an entire weeks worth of research and my opinions were turning into a very long read. As the title suggests, this article focuses on the results of my primary research so far.
After spending nearly every evening and my weekend conducting some form of research I’ve now managed to get to the analyse part. Though it is said ‘research is never done’ and should be a continuous effort, I’m doing a project that is the result of signing up for an 8-week evening course, so we have to pause the research at some point just so we can move on to the next step.
That said I spent Sunday evening, Monday lunchtime and evening digging into the data I had collected and tried to find out what my participants felt was damaging to their wellbeing in their open office spaces.
Survey’s and what they don’t tell you
As I'd mentioned in a previous post, a survey helps you get a general consensus and if anything, it helps you get the numbers to back up or challenge your hypotheses. Though these large numbers are helpful, it means that a survey if not careful constructed (mine probably wasn’t…) can mean that you don’t gain real deep insights into your problems, which may mean that you won’t end up solving the real issues that your user faces.
I had sent out my survey on the Friday and found that I had a good response by the afternoon — In the end 13 people took part in the space of 4 days, which I feel is a great number of answers in such a small timeframe. Though I was looking for quantity, upon reflecting on the data I could have done with more quality.
There were plenty of cases where I got one-word answers, or that the responses were brief and didn’t go into the why the respondent answered in a specific way. This could have been for many reasons, people may have been busy when answering, they may have been on a mobile device or my questions may have not prompted a deep enough answer — which is most likely.
That said by running this survey I found that;
- 7 out of 13 felt that noise was a distraction during their day at work.
- 6 out of 13 felt that an environment that had people who were stressed, in conflict or negative, affected their wellbeing.
- 8 out of 13 said that social spaces such as the kitchen in their office space were their favourite space. This was closely followed by peoples favouritism to their own desks, and then quiet spaces with 3 out of 13 people saying this was their favourite place.
At the core of this data set were value and meaning in their work. I found that people want to limit their distractions at work because they want to spend time on getting real valuable work done, and this means they need chunks of uninterrupted time to make progress.
That said, the survey shows that people don’t want this isolation all the time and appreciate feeling part of the team, socialising with co-workers when appropriate or a break is needed.
The survey also reinforced the information I had collected in my primary research, physical environments play an important part in employees wellbeing. Those who responded to my survey commented that they liked lots of space, natural light and areas that they can spend time away from their desks.
User interviews
We were encouraged by our tutor to spend time doing user interviews over any other kind of primary research and that was for good reason. Though I only organised 3 interviews, I also had off the record conversations with my coworkers. These kinds of conversations are where you can gain a real understanding about users thoughts, motivations and fears as there the structure is looser than a survey and people don’t feel as though they are being questioned.
User interviews work really well if you have the time to run them as you don’t have to stick to a setlist of questions, as you are their face to face with your user you can push your participant to respond if you need more clarification on a point, or if something they say is of interest you can pursue that conversation further, compared to a survey where you can’t follow up with a users thought process.
Empathy Maps
After I had cleaned up the notes from each interview, I printed them out so I could go through each and highlight information that I thought was interesting or important. Naturally, I could have stayed on the computer and done this task, but there is something that makes physical pieces of paper easier to deal with compared to a desktop app.
From the information I highlighted, I then used Miro — A visual collaboration too, to create Empathy Maps. Miro is a great tool, with templates which you can use for free for up to 3 boards which is great for small projects like this.
I have never created an empathy map in my day job, therefore I tried to do as much reading as I could on the method before starting. We were told about Empathy Maps briefly in our first lesson, but I didn’t feel like I had enough information to happily go off on my own to create one or two.
What I found from my research is that there isn’t one way to create an empathy map, which means for a novice it proves difficult to know if you’re doing it right, and when I say right I mean whether it’s a meaningful activity or something just for show.
I decided to take a simplistic approach and look at what a user says, thinks & feels, see’s & hears and does. I found this task difficult as I felt that ‘surely everything in a user interview becomes what a user says’. I thought that perhaps the thinks and feels section could be your interpretation of what your user has said. For example, if a user says “I get in when no one is around so I can focus on tasks” this could be turned into a think and feel easily by rewriting as “I feel distracted around others” or “I’ve got a lot of work to do”.
For the most part, the Empathy Maps did feel useful once I had done one for each of my interviewees. It turnt my written notes into smaller more tangible chunks which I could actually work with. Also by having these maps, it allowed to me see where themes had started to appear.
Comparing both my survey and my interviews it seemed that there was a core issue around being distracted and this topic of distraction fell into two pillars.
1. Being accidentally distracted; Noise in the office, Sounds of the door buzzer, Loud conversations by coworkers.
2. Being intentionally distracted; Coworkers coming over to ask questions, Phone calls, Email and Slack notifications.
Though there were many other problems that my survey and interview participants surfaced, the problem around distraction seemed to be the most important and common among all.
Creating Personas
The final task before our next lesson was to take our insights and create Personas for the themes of users and use cases that we have found during the research stage.
Once again I haven’t really dealt with Personas properly before, I’ve heard of them, and have seen them designed and looking fancy all over Medium or Dribbble but I have never engaged with the reason as to why they would help me. I’ve tried to use them in a client project before, but I feel as though we may have done it the wrong way round, we were trying to create a persona on our imaginary ideal user, rather creating a persona from real or potential user behaviours and problems.
As I had done with the Empathy Maps, I spent some time researching what was needed in a persona and the results were kind of inconclusive. With a lot of the research I’ve done in how to do Human-Centred Design, it appears that it always depends on the situation and there isn’t a one size fits all approach. For someone like me who likes to know exactly what the requirements are and that there is a clear marker for success, it is difficult for me to work with this amount vagueness as I don’t know when I’m done or whether what I’ve created is right and will help me design later on.
As time is of the essence, and my next lesson fast approaching I decided to copy the layout and the content structure of the persona we had seen in the presentation on our first lesson. The Personas I had found on the internet were far more detailed than I felt comfortable with — information such as education level, tech prolificacy, name of their best friends dog.
In terms of my project so far I don’t see how this would aid my creation of solutions, later on, it felt more like additional noise than clarifying who my user was, another reason I didn’t want to add this kind of content was because I didn’t have the data to back this up. I’m sure I can refine my Personas later when I collect more data, and that’s if it is even necessary.
Now that I have my research, insights and Personas to hand I am now ready for the next session which will be focused on ideation. As explained to us last week this is concept development and elaboration – through Service design techniques. All sounds very interesting and I’m looking forward to this next part.
👉 Read Part one: Week 1: Part 1 — Understanding Human-Centred Design and starting our first brief
👉 Read Part two: Week 1: Part 2 — Understanding our users
