LUMID is a research and design brief created for Parlay Concepts that improves their online application by helping users and companies better navigate the User Centered Design process.
My Role
In this project partnering with Parlay Concepts, I worked as a co-researcher lead uncovering new insights, user needs, design imperatives, and design solutions for improving novice navigation within a User Centered Design process.
Key Contributions:
Design Thinking
Research Scoping
Data Collection & Synthesis
Qualitative Research & Analysis
Team Members: Aaron Joya, Jason Runyuan Chen, Leena Choi
Project Goal
In order to better help our partnering client we had 2 main project goals:
1) Identify key areas of focus to help UX novice designers.
2) Apply these key areas of focus in the context of improving our clients application.
Key Research Questions
To reach our project goals we needed to understand these 3 questions:
1. What do experts in UX do in early design phases?
2. What do novices in UX do in early design phases?
3. How can we help novice UX practitioners develop ideas in early design phases?
Methodologies and Process:
Our design process consisted of all the elements typically found in any design thinking process and uniquely we were using this process to better understand how UX novices and experts conduct their own process...Very meta design process.
Literature Review
We believed great design decisions not only stem from users but are grounded in literature, evidence, and research. In cross referencing data between what users values and what we find in literature we can create a stronger evidence based decisions.
The three most important take aways from our literature review:
1. “Design generally begins with a need...” - Michael J. French in Conceptual Design for Engineers
As it came to no surprise need finding and understanding users needs was at the forefront of our literature review and what is most important when starting any concept or design endeavor.
As stated in the paper "Large-Scale Needfinding: Methods of Increasing User-Generated Needs From Large Populations", need finding is the objective of studying the user to understand what unmet needs exist and how these needs can inform the requirements of new concepts or solutions.
2. Need finding generates design imperatives and design solutions.
Need finding becomes extremely important because it generates design imperatives. These design imperatives serve as concrete foundations for design solutions.
Design imperatives - specific properties that would address a users’ needs.
Design solutions - concepts, products, or prototypes that directly follow the design imperatives and thus solve problems or challenges.
3. 9 Characteristics of expert designers vs novice designers
We had a hunch there was research out there that studied what made expert designers so called "experts". With enough digging we found a study on qualities that experts acquired that influenced better design. In the paper "Understanding the Difference between how novice and experienced designers approach design tasks" we found a list of 9 characteristics that expert designers displayed while conducting aerospace design tasks.
These characteristics would serve as a strong foundation for which we would use as to determine if these same characteristics carried within our UX experts and to the UX field.
9 characteristics defined in S. Ahmed, K. M. Wallace, and L. T. Blessing, “Understanding the differences between how novice and experienced designers approach design tasks,” Research in Engineering Design, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–11,2003.
Subject Matter Expert (SME) Interviews
Key Research Question: What do experts in UX do in early design phases?
To answer this key question we recruited and conducted 10 SME interviews with industry designers and professionals with varying ranges of experience within the UX field.
We designed a semi-structured interview script that allowed us to have predetermined questions to find more about design thinking, need finding, and the process that these experts go about conducting these phases. We found that each interview typically lasted between 1 hour to 1 and half hours.
Novice Interviews
Key Research Question: What do novice in UX do in early design phases?
Next we recruited and conducted 10 Novice interviews with students at the UW who have taken 1-2 UX related courses. In these Novice interview sessions we also stuck to a semi-structured interview process however, we found many of the questions to be misunderstood and so we but altered some of terms in order to better accommodate the novice and obtain the information we needed.
Through theses questions we hoped to get the novice perspective in a similar fashion to the SME interviews. We noticed off the bat that these interviews were a lot shorter and typically ranging between 25 minutes to1 hour. In this analysis process we analyzed this demographic all together and continued to use a grounded theory approach to identify emerging themes and theories.
Product Analysis
The goal was to not just to improve the our clients application and we needed to determine what areas our client Parlay already excelled at and where they might have been falling short.
Some information was classified and we had virtually no access to our clients customers and users of the current application (per client request).
We relied on mostly internal information asking some questions with the different stakeholders of the company:
What do you believe are the strengths/weakness of your product?
What are the strengths/weaknesses your customer and users base say about your product?
Who do you consider your main competitors? What does your product do that is different?
What could you improve about your current product?
We gathered further data on the product functions, flows, and features from our own mock tests of the application as well as pilot participants to use and comment on the use of the product.
Strengths
Compared to many of the other competitors excels in its ability to provide a UCD process for users follow and develop their concepts. Parlay unlike its other competitors offers a free version for individuals to use the system and essentially learn the tool.
Weakness
Parlay is still in the startup phase and have a minimum viable product that doesn't have a fully curated library of methodologies that really help users through the process of UCD. At the same time the processes while helpful aren’t fully optimized to meet the needs of great conceptual development. Therefore more work can be done to truly optimize their features and truly stand out amongst the competition as a tool helping concepts through a UCD methodology. The current usability of the product makes the product largely hard to understand and detracts from the overall utility of the product. With further user testing the overall product of Parlay can be better made to help users not only use the product but understand the methodologies for successful concept development.
Opportunities
Parlay’s opportunity in developing an online UCD platform is not only unique but many competitors are not currently doing this. The ability to provide an accessible UCD tool is difficult endeavor however with the appropriate technique, resources, and understanding of UCD we believe Parlay has a unique problem space in which can truly excel.
Competitive Analysis
We conducted a competitive analysis to map similar or competing products and to understand the threats.
We wanted to know:
Where the opportunity for growth and or specialization lie?
How can we cross reference data to influence design solutions?
Affinity Analysis & Thematic Mapping
Key Research Question: How can we help novice UX practitioners develop ideas in early design phases?
After gathering various pieces of data for the puzzle this was Part 1 of 3 in answering our key research question. We used affinity analysis and a modified grounded theory approach to identify emerging themes and theories related to the specific purposes.
After conducting interviews, we transcribed all the data line by line, then utilized affinity diagramming & analysis to combine like ideas creating thematic groupings of ideas (codes) from the transcribed interview data.
We did this twice - once for all the experts and a second session for all the novices.
Our crazy diabolical affinity analysis session! Including all novice and expert interview data.
Thematic Maps
Taking the themes (codes) of the affinity analysis sessions, we cross referenced the data with the 9 characteristics of expert designers vs novice designers found in the literature review.
To capture variance in the data we created new characteristics that we believed uniquely applied to our UX demographic (remember that the paper specified aerospace designers).
These thematic maps created strong research based evidence that could strongly improve not just Parlay but any project management application, design project, and or even curriculum. We had created a great visual representation of our data that showed the biggest disparities amongst the services of Parlay, Novices, and Experts.
Concept Maps
These concept maps indicated unique insights about novice vs experts designers uncovered through our affinity analysis sessions.
These themes would help produce both conceptual maps and thematic maps in order to compare our different demographics. (Note: The following concept maps is constrained to our Novice and SME interview data. Further testing is necessary for generalizations)
Ideation Phase
Through the thematic overlays we were able to find 3 main disparities and vital areas of focus that are most distinguishable amongst Novice UX practitioners (NP) vs UX Expert practitioners (SME) and further more areas for which Parlay should pay extra attention towards within the product.
Areas of Focus
Team Participation
Our expert indicated Team participation was a huge factor of success for a project. Understanding a team was not just understanding the flow of a team or the progression of a project, but to understand the importance of other roles, your specific role, and each persons individual strengths and weakness within their role that better a project's flow, hand off, and overall base quality.
Aware of Reason
The second area of focus was being Aware of Reason. Having the ability to justify your work helps to reinforce the UX practitioners knowledge and understanding of a particular work, process, or decision. Additionally being aware of reasons for a decision also helps to persuade others about why it was done. Our experts exhibited the ability to talk about why they made a decision and how the outcome of that decision would help progress a project. While many of our novices made decisions based on a book, blog, or teacher that told them to do something and not understanding the mechanics of why they were doing it and how it would help.
Aware of Direction
Uniquely being aware of the reason for making a decision, helps in focusing on a project’s direction. In knowing why something is done and how the outcome can help the next step, better mechanisms for finding an overall direction is achieved. Being aware of direction helps the individual and team develop a transparent understanding of the goals, metrics of success, and associated tasks for each part of the project.
Design Phase
Finally in the design phase we focused on addressing the 3 areas of focus mentioned above. Through implementing our fidnings into a design we were able to visually represent how one could improve the product and services of Parlay.