ustomer-centric, the importance of understanding your users’ motivations is increasing. As designers, it’s our job to gather and synthesize customer input and turn it into actionable design strategy. User interviews are a great way understand your users’ motivations, but some ideas are hard to verbalize. Plus, traditional 1-on-1 interviews lack flexibility and don’t get to the core of human emotions. In this DesignTalk, we’ll learn how to use generative research tools—or hands-on exercises—to understand your users' motivations. You’ll learn how to uncover unspoken desires, expectations, and lifestyle habits. By the end of the webinar, you’ll have a variety of activities to use to take the speculation out of product decisions and surface new customer opportunities.

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2. How to Really Understand
Your Users' Motivations
March 22nd, 2017

3. First, a story.
Once upon a time...

4. Me

5. +
Misael

6. Daisy Wheel is an App for
breast cancer prevention
for teenage girls

8. Why this talk?
Customer input for a meaningful solution
Products must fit lifestyle of users
Human mind is complicated

9. Conversations with users
may feel incomplete...
What to ask next?

10. Generative Research
Because...
Participants produce an
“artifact” with their hands

11. Hands-on exercises to enable
conversations???
Why?
?!

12. What we say
How we feel
(gap)

13. All people are
creative by nature...

14. interviews / surveys
observation
generative
tools
say
think
do / use
know / feel / dream
What people... MethodsSurface
Deep

15. UX Design Process

16. Creativity, thought,
and action are driven by
our emotions

18. Recollection Exercises
Remember, select, talk about, and interpret past events
Describe behavior, thoughts, and feelings
Connect the dots of seemingly disconnected events

19. Projective Exercises
Talk about sensitive topics
Express abstract feelings and thoughts
Verbalize unspoken emotions

20. Type of Exercises
LIST MAD LIB STORIES SORT
TRACK BUILD MAP PLAY

21. 1. Lists
1. Low effort to complete but yield rich discussion.
2. Collecting elements of a category —e.g. “Types of meals I cook.”
3. Gathering feelings and needs around a topic
4. Compiling inventories —e.g. “What’s in my bathroom cabinet?”

22. A List combined with a Diagram to
show priority of elements.
The inner circle is the highest
priority while the outer circles are of
least importance.
Concentric Circles

23. Participants list their experiences
before, during, and after 1-on-1
meetings with team members.
Timelapse List
Before
During
After

24. 2. Mad Lib
1. Eliciting associations, desires, preferences, values
2. Gathering participant’s own words around a prompt to evaluate symbolic
meanings associated with the topic
3. Used to assess motivations and attitudes
4. Easy to create and offer high value results!
A.k.a. Sentence Completion

25. Participants projecting their
perspectives on ideal values for a
newcomer during recruiting process.
Sentence Completion

26. Understanding the preferences and
attitudes of young people when
redeeming promo codes in
restaurants.
Sentence Completion
and Drawing

27. 1. Learning about negative & positive events
2. Exploring a category —understanding perspectives and values
around a topic
3. Gathering lessons learned
4. These are best as solo-work to enable enough time for reflection
3. Stories

28. Snags & Delights are mini-stories
about negative and positive
experiences on recent events.
Mini-Stories

29. A letter can help to understand
the impact of past choices on a
participant’s current state.
Letter to Myself

30. A personal letter written to a product
often reveals profound insights value
and expectations from objects in
everyday lives.
The Break-Up Letter

31. 4. Sort
1. Identifying and exploring categories. Relationships among elements (leads
to uncovering mental models)
2. Learning about preferences and priorities (when participants rank order
elements)
3. Remembering stories (when participants select or sort images)
4. Create a deck of triggers/images collaboratively (it helps eliminate gaps in
your individual thinking)

32. Increasing a system’s findability.
Give users a set of cards, each labeled
with a piece of content or
functionality.
Ask them to sort them into groups
that make sense of them.
Card Sorting

33. Photo deck to choose images that
best fit certain criteria.
Exercise to redesign travel-related
site. Participants were given photos,
typefaces, and moods so they could
react to an unbranded site.
Association Deck

34. Wait, but …
how can I set all this up?
?!

35. Setting the Stage
Prototype the exercise and pilot it
Prepare the toolkit and tokens
8-10 participants, 1-on-1 sessions, 30-40 mins
Don’t ask for stakeholders’ permission… yet

36. 5. Track
1. Recording behavior, routines, feelings over time
2. Gathering photos from participant POV —empowers your participants!
3. Enabling awareness of automatic behavior around a topic
4. Good platform for comparing moments —e.g. Does this log reflect what
is normal?

37. 30 day Mood Calendar to track
emotions, key moments, and provide
a platform for follow-up discussion.
Mood Calendar

38. Snippets of experiences during a
period of time.
Useful to spot patterns difficult to
identify by recall.
A template is used to log moments.
Diary Study
Source: Designing for Sustainability link

39. 6. Make
1. Using metaphors & analogies to express hard-to-articulate ideas
2. Capturing moods & feelings
3. Generating future scenarios
4. Participants need lots of time to create and explain - Do not rush!

40. Participants were given Lego pieces
to build a city.
The goal was to simulate sprints
under an Agile environment.
Lego Simulation

41. Cut-outs of design elements for
participants to use to build paper
prototypes, prioritize features, add
new features, etc.
Cut-out Interface

42. In this exercise we had participants
(Millennials) plan their financial
future.
Manual activity forces them to
imagine their future selves and
discover ways insurance fit into their
story.
Timeline Board

43. How to project your professional
career by asking participants to map
milestones and major achievements
for their future.
Ideal Future Journey

44. 7. Map
1. Understanding relationships among elements in a category
2. Comparing activities to locations
3. Creating multiple layers of meaning to explore:
- Likes/dislikes/feelings
- Channel use
- Purpose/role of mapped items
- Priority of mapped items

45. Measuring the importance of Social
media tools, how each engages the
participant, the purpose of each tool,
and how people control interactions
among them.
Social Media Map

46. Modeling and understanding complex
services with no diagramming skills.
Envision the story of how users
experience a service, making
emphasis on key touch points.
Business Origami

47. 8. Play
1. Exploring important scenarios — Noticing emotions and assumptions in
different scenarios
2. Lessening pressure around sensitive topics
3. Gathering values, norms, rules, and native language
4. Exploring solution spaces

48. Participants were asked to emulate
their ideal 1-on-1 session to improve
the digital process of an application
for 1-on-1s
Role Play

49. Participants were asked to act as
objects or persons related to a
service.
Spot opportunities to improve the
journey they go through when
interacting within a service chain.
Games

50. ...you can customize and
create your own

51. What would be next?
Refine your exercise — let it evolve over time
Improve rapport skills — use the exercise as a tool
Interpret results using Affinity Diagrams — spot patterns
Generate a solution collaboratively with your team

52. Become a better listener
and reach a shared
understanding
Make a conversation
unfold naturally and
achieve a strong rapport
Get rich information on
users’ motivations,
expectations, and emotions
Understanding Your Users

53. Understanding Your Users
Discover ways to get stories
full of emotion and detail
Learn from the participants’
own insights about
themselves
Feel true empathy to
generate a solution

54. Takeaways
“It’s not the customer’s job to know
what they want” - Jobs
Deeper emotions with hands-on exercises
Customize your own methods

55. Bella Martin &
Bruce Hanington
Liz Sanders &
Pieter Jan Stappers

56. Q&A

57. mleon@nearsoft.com
misaello
misaelleon
Misael Leon
Product Designer
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Thanks!