Useful things to remember
Index
Focus on the as-is situation
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Focus on the as-is situation
Someone says that to solve a problem Einstein would spend 90% of the time understanding the problem and the rest of the time finding a solution. In MSF Italy we push for a throurough understanding of the situation - the as-is - before thinking about solutions. Think about it, a great solution for the wrong problem, is not a solution at all.
The following are the steps we encourage to take in order to get a 360° view over the problem or opportunity we are investaginting, but you don't need to follow this exact same order for all the activities.
Tip: Think from a user perspective
We encourage a human centred approach: before deep diving in the problem from a technical perspective think about who are your users and how do they experience what you want to solve. Be careful that users can be both internal (e.g. a colleague from another department) or external (e.g. humanitarian aid, volunteers or citizens)
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02
Conduct interviews
Interviews are a great tool to get a lot of qualitative information in short time, by asking questions to the people who are directly involved in the area or activity you are trying to innovate.
Interviews shall be done in a proper manner, preparing a list of questions to ask in advance. Avoid closed questions and leading questions. A great starter is: "Tell me about your experience of...". Be ready to follow where the conversation goes. A good way to conduct interviews is in 2, 1 person leading the conversation and the other taking notes. Always set some time after the interview to highlight the most important things that the interviewee said. In this way your analysis will go faster!
You can find more information on how to prepare a discussion guide to facilitate the interview sessions at this link.
Tip: keep them individual
Even if one, two or even more people may be involved in the same activity, it’s important to run the interviews individually with each of them (instead of being all together in a group conversation). This will give everyone the possibility to express their thoughts and considerations, and help get honest opinions about what is working or not working well. You will have time to inform all the people that need to get involved on the project.
Tip: choose the right participants
When deciding who to interview is helpful to think of extremes and mainstreams. Extremes are users who perform the activity you’re interested in with high frequency. Mainstreams are users that have a more moderate use of involvement with the specific service or activity, but could still provide meaningful insight. It’s not important to have a huge sample, even 6 or 8 interviews could be enough, but be sure to include different kind of users and demographics.
Warning: go beyond what people say
What people say and what people do, feel and think are not always aligned. So interviews are a good tool, but should be always accompanied with other type of data (e.g. collection of numbers and facts, direct observation, but also reading between the lines and interpreting other people’s behaviours).
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03
Observe carefully
Observation is a great way to understand how people behave and what they do - independently from what they said. You can just observe without asking anything like an adventurer on Discovery Channel (this technique is called "shadowing"). Or you can ask the participant to tell you what they are doing at each step (this technique is called "speak-aloud").
Record of the session is a powerful way to go over some steps, allowing you to get even more insights.
Tip: get prepared for the observation
Preparing a dedicated support such as a printed grid or notebook with specific investigation areas to fill during the session could be valuable as reminder of data points to capture. You can also write down some bullet points or prepare a digital whiteboard to take notes during the observation.
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04
Map behaviours and needs
Understanding the needs, expectations and feelings of the people involved in your design is central to get an in-depth knowledge of the situation and a better solution for them. There're several ways in which you could analyse the emotional layers and deeply understand struggle, frustrations and needs of your users, here you can find some examples.
Example: empathy map and personas
Empathy map and personas are good ways to analyse insights from the users perspective on any service or process where they are involved.
The key element is to focus on your user, and ask yourself what they do, think, say and feel in relation to a specific topic (https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/empathy-map) or write down all your hypothesis and insights related to the needs and challenges they face (https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/personas)
Example: user journey
User journeys provide a representation of the emotional state of a person in specific moments of a given process or experience. For example, the Association Coordination created this map (link) of the emotional journey of remote participants during a hybrid meeting. If you compare with the good practice of any experience (start-peaks-end), you can immediately appreciate that the people are not having much fun in this meeting. Actually is quite impressive that they were connected till the end!
Learn more about the tool at this link (https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/emotional-journey).
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