From Design Research Workshop by Kelly Goto

Hi Everyone,

I went to the "Design Research: The art of getting it done" workshop by Kelly Goto yesterday, Wednesday, 7th October. This workshop is part of the Web Directions South 2009 Conference. The workshop was held at the Masonic Centre, Sydney. I've gained a lot of information and knowledge in one day. It's a pretty intensive workshop and we went through things very quickly. However, it was a pretty hands-on practical approach. Overall, it was a fun and enjoyable session.

I would like to share with you a few notes that I took, which I might be useful to you. I didn't take many detailed notes (I apologised in advance!). As I said before, it's pretty hands-on and we pretty much went straight into doing the practical exercise.

As mentioned before, the topic is about design research. To put it simply, it felt like I was doing a whole semester subject pack in one day.

We had lectures on Design Research. Kelly used a quote from Liz Sanders of Dubberly.com to describe what Design Research is. According to Sanders, "Design Research is a jumble of approaches that, while competing as well as complimentary, nonetheless share a common goal: to drive, inspire and inform the design development process". This includes research methods such as user needs analysis, usability testing, card sorting, contextual inquiry and so on.

Design research is a process of how to design your product by firstly defining the user experience. The methods you choose in your research will be based on how you define the user experience for your product from the practical and emotional point of view. The more emotionally driven your product, the more qualitative type of research you will need take such as doing contextual inquiry and in-depth interviews. The best method would be to combine the practical/quantitative research (task oriented) with the emotional/qualitative research (behaviour oriented).

The message I took home from this lecture was "Knowing what people think they would do is different from actually learning how they live". I think this is a very important message which is often forgotten when we're designing. The information you get from users survey and focus group alone is not enough to understand your users needs. You need to dig deeper by conducting in-depth interviews or observations in users environment. Only then, you can really understand how your users live using your design/product.

We also had a lecture on rapid prototyping. Depending on the budget and requirements for your project, you can do from low-fidelity, mid-fidelity to high-fidelity prototype. Low-fidelity prototype can be easily created using sketches/paper prototype, powerpoint slides or clickable PDFs. Mid-fidelity will have some functionality and can be created using Visio, Flash and HTML. High-fidelity is a fully functional framework and usually created in the application framework development such as .NET, Rails (Rubi on Rails), etc. I have included a list of tools you can used to do prototyping at the bottom of this post.

For the exercise, we're put in the group for each table. There were about 7 of us in the group. The brief is to develop "The Magic Thing" prototype. "The Magic Thing" is a concept of developing a new and "near future" prototype for product, applications, web services, mobile devices, etc. The task would be to:
1. Define what and where would be our "Magic Thing" concept (context)
2. Define who our users are (audience)
3. Define how the "Magic Thing" application would work (functionality)

To do the task above we brainstormed ideas of what our "Magic Thing" application would be and how it should work. We conducted users' needs analysis. We developed sketch personas and user scenarios. We did user interviews to check our requirements and users needs analysis, We built paper prototype (wireframes) and finally we did a quick prototype testing with our users using the scenarios and wireframes. I can't believe we did all that in one day. It's all pretty intense but it's exciting.

Finally, Kelly also make sure that we went away with a set of toolbox we can use in our own design process. The following resources could be handy for your future reference:

Online Survey tools:

• "Survey Monkey": http://www.surveymonkey.com/
• "Wufoo": http://wufoo.com/
• "Surveybob": http://www.surveybob.com/surveybob/index.html
• "Esurveypro": http://www.esurveyspro.com/
• "Zoomerang": http://zoomerang.com/

Remote Testing tool

• "Gotomeeting": https://www2.gotomeeting.com/?Portal=gotomeeting.com
• "UserVue": http://www.techsmith.com/uservue.asp
• "Morae": http://www.techsmith.com/morae.asp
• "Silverback": http://silverbackapp.com/
• "Dimdim": http://www.dimdim.com/

For Mid-Fidelity Rapid Prototyping Tool

• "Just in Mind": http://justinmind.com/
• "Mock App": http://mockapp.com/
• "Omnigraffle": http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/
• Adobe Flash : http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/?promoid=BPDEE

For High-Fidelity Rapid Prototyping Tool

• "Django": http://www.djangoproject.com/
• "Plone": http://plone.org/
• "Rails": http://rubyonrails.org/

That's all I can share today and I hope these resources can be helpful to you. More information on Kelly Goto can be found on her website: gotomedia.

Thank you for reading.