DESIGN THINKING

CONTEXT OF USER INTERFACE DESIGN

MODULE-4
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ACTUAL GOAL OF PERCEIVED GOAL OF

CONSUMERS CONSUMERS
Personal goal : Cleark’s To create perfect
goal is to finish daily small invoice
tasks, appear smart in
front of the boss

TARGET : Fulfilment of
personal goals
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Strengths of personas as a design tool
ü Determine what a product should do and how it should behave. Persona goals and tasks provide the
foundation for the design effort.

ü Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers. Personas provide a common
language for discussing design decisions and also help keep the design cantered on users at every step
in the process.

ü Build consensus and commitment to the design. It’s easier to understand the many nuances of user
behavior through the narrative structures that personas employ. Put simply, because personas
resemble real people, they’re easier to relate to than feature lists and flowcharts.

ü Measure the design’s effectiveness. It provides a powerful reality-check tool for designers trying to
solve design problems. This allows design iteration to occur rapidly and inexpensively at the
whiteboard, and it results in a far stronger design baseline when the time comes to test with actual
people.

ü Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans. The authors have seen
their clients repurpose personas across their organization, informing marketing campaigns,
organizational structure, and other strategic planning activities.
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STEP 1 - Each branch has a
pain point derived from
the story board and
consumer survey

STEP 2 – Write all possible

solutions in the sub
branches and create
graphic icons wherever
necessary

STEP 3 – Filter the

solutions which can be
implemented in app
Sftfbsdi • How does the product fit into the broader context of people’s
lives?
• What goals motivate people to use the product, and what basic
CUSTOMER tasks help people accomplish these goals?
SURVEY • What experiences do people find compelling?
(QUALITATIVE + • How do these relate to the product being designed?
QUANTITATIVE) What problems do people encounter with their current ways of
doing things?

• List all possible problems and create a mind

DISTIL THE map
RESULTS • Narrow down the target audience

• Narrow down some problems

POSSIBLE
• Possible solution sketches
SOLUTIONS
• Finalize the target audience
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• Qualitative research can also help the

progress of design projects by:

• Providing credibility and authority to the

design team, because design decisions can
be traced to research results

• Uniting the team with a common

understanding of domain issues and user
concerns

• Empowering management to make more

informed decisions about product design
issues that would otherwise be based on
guesswork or personal preference
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CURRENT AND POTENTIAL
Identifying candidates

Based on information received from stakeholders, SMEs, and literature reviews, designers
need to create a hypothesis that serves as a starting point in determining what sorts of
users and potential users to interview.

The persona hypothesis : The persona hypothesis is a first cut at defining the different
kinds of users (and sometimes customers) for a product. The hypothesis serves as the
basis for initial interview planning; as interviews proceed, new interviews may be
required if the data indicates the existence of user types not originally identified.

The persona hypothesis attempts to address, at a high level, these three questions:

• What different sorts of people might use this product?

• How might their needs and behaviours vary?
• What ranges of behaviour and types of environments need to be explored?
Contextual inquiry

Contextual inquiry enumerates four basic principles for engaging in ethnographic interviews:

• Context — Rather than interviewing the user in a clean white room, interact with them and observe the
user in her normal work environment, or whatever physical context is appropriate for the product.

• Partnership — The interview and observation should take the tone of a collaborative exploration with the
user, alternating between observation of work and discussion of its structure and details.

• Interpretation — Much of the work of the designer is reading between the lines of facts gathered about
users’ behaviours, their environment, and what they say. These facts must be taken together as a whole
and analysed to uncover the design implications. Avoid Assumptions.

• Focus — Rather than coming to interviews with a set questionnaire or letting the interview wander
aimlessly, the designer needs to subtly direct the interview so as to capture data relevant to design issues.
Improving on contextual inquiry

• Shorten the interview process — Contextual inquiry assumes full-day interviews with users.
Interviews as short as one hour can be sufficient to gather the necessary user data, for a
sufficient number of interviews (about six well-selected users for each hypothesized role or
type) are scheduled. Find a diverse set of users.

• Use smaller design teams — Contextual inquiry assumes a large design team that conducts
multiple interviews in parallel, followed by debriefing sessions in which the full team
participates. It is more effective to conduct interviews sequentially with the same designers in
each interview. It means that the entire team interacts with all interviewed users directly,
allowing the members to most effectively analyse and synthesize the user data.

• Identify goals first —identify and prioritize user goals before determining the tasks that relate
to these goals.

• Looking beyond business contexts — The vocabulary of contextual inquiry assumes a business
product and a corporate environment. Ethnographic interviews are also possible in consumer
domains, though the focus of questioning is somewhat different, as we describe later in this
chapter.
Basic methods – Types of Questions
The basic methods of ethnographic interviewing are simple, straightforward, and very low
tech. Follow the suggestions below, be rewarded with a wealth of useful qualitative data:

• Interview where the interaction happens

• Avoid a fixed set of questions
• Focus on goals first, tasks second
• Avoid making the user a designer
• Avoid discussions of technology
• Encourage storytelling
• Ask for a show and tell
• Avoid leading questions
When interviewing customers, you will want to understand:

• Their goals in purchasing the product

• Their frustrations with current solutions

• Their decision process for purchasing a product of the type you’re designing

• Their role in installation, maintenance, and management of the product

• Domain-related issues and vocabulary

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CURRENT AND POTENTIAL

Information we are interested in learning from users includes:

1. The context of how the product (or analogous system, if no current product exists)
fits into their lives or workflow: when, why, and how the product is or will be used
2. Domain knowledge from a user perspective: What do users need to know to do
their jobs?
3. Current tasks and activities: both those the current product is required to
accomplish and those it doesn’t support
4. Goals and motivations for using their product
5. Mental model: how users think about their jobs and activities, as well as what
expectations users have about the product
6. Problems and frustrations with current products (or an analogous system if no
current product exists)
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The qualitative research activities we have found to be most useful in our practice
are:

1. Stakeholder interviews - anyone with authority and/or responsibility for the product being
designed. More specifically, stakeholders are key members of the organization commissioning the
design work, and typically include executives, managers, and representative contributors from
development, sales, product management, marketing, customer support, design, and usability.
They may also include similar people from other organizations in business partnership with the
commissioning organization.

2. Subject matter expert (SME) interviews –

• SMEs are often expert users.
• SMEs are knowledgeable, but they aren’t designers
• SMEs are necessary in complex or specialized domains - medicine
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3. User and customer interviews
4. User observation/ethnographic field studies
5. Literature review
6. Product/prototype and competitive audits
User observations

• Interviews to be performed outside the context of the situations. You

can talk to users about how they think they behave, or you can
observe their behaviour first-hand. The latter route provides superior
results.

• Make use of technological aides such as audio or video recorders to

capture what users say and do. Video may also prove useful in
situations where note taking is difficult, such as in a moving car.
Literature review

• This should include - product marketing plans, brand strategy, market

research, user surveys, technology specifications and white papers,
business and technical journal articles, competitive studies, Web
searches for related and competing products and news, usability
study results and metrics.

• The design team should collect this literature, use it as a basis for
developing questions to ask stakeholders and SMEs, and later use it to
supply additional domain knowledge and vocabulary, and to check
against compiled user data.
Product and competitive audits

• Parallel to stakeholder and SME interviews, examine any existing

version or prototype of the product, as well as its chief competitors.
Doing so gives the design team a sense of the state of the art, and
provides fuel for questions during the interviews.

• Engage in an informal heuristic or expert review of both the current

and competitive interfaces, comparing each against interaction and
visual design principles. This procedure both familiarizes the team
with the strengths and limitations of what is currently available to
users, and provides a general idea of the current functional scope of
the product.
 CUSTOMER SURVEY
(QUALITATIVE + QUANTITATIVE)

• Typical • Situations of

DEVELOP PROBE QUESTIONS

GROUP AND CATEGORISE
BRAINSTORM
situations use • Very important
• Frustrations • Different price to ask the write
they encounter values questions to
• Expectations • Duration of use get the answer
EFTJHO!UIJOLJOH

from the • Storage after • Don’t feed

product use information in
• Services they • Preferred their mind by
wish to get Brands giving
after purchase adjectives and
limited options
(MCQs)
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• Understanding users’ desires, needs, motivations, and

contexts

• Understanding business, technical, and domain

opportunities, requirements, and constraints

• Using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create

products whose form, content, and behaviour is useful,
usable, and desirable, as well as economically viable and
technically feasible
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JEFB!TDSFFOJOH!` CONCEPT REVIEW
WITH TEAM

PASS
(promising and contributes to
company’s goals)

RECYCLE
(Gather more information, 2nd
chance to do better)

STOP
(project fails to meet the projected
needs, returns to the stockpile)
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IDEATE +
SHORTLIST
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TARGET PROPOSED PRODUCT CUSTOMER

MARKET PRICE BENEFITS REVIEW AND
CONCEPT
• Where the competitor The product may • How is it an innovative feature, .
TESTING
lacks have to come in at and how is it going to solve a
• Where is the scope for a particular price problem? Present it to the set of
improvement point in order to • The product (and processes) selected customers. How
• Existing white space in fill out a product may have to meet they perceive the idea is
the market line. environmental requirements the test of the efforts so
(such as a specified percent of far.
recycled material, or certain
chemicals being eliminated
from the manufacturing
process)