1. Setting the scene
This week marked the start of the user research (or ‘empathise’) stage of our design process. For this module’s assessment, we had the choice to follow a design brief set for us by our tutors or to come up with a concept and problem space of our own.
1.1. Self-criticism: overthinking
Towards the start of the week, I found myself consumed by ‘analysis paralysis’ (“over-analysing (or over-thinking) a situation [...] so that a decision or action is never finally taken, resulting in paralysing the outcome” (Kurien 2014: 323)). Essentially, I was torn between choosing a project of my own that I could tailor to my own interests or sticking to the suggested brief, causing me to lose several of the hours I'd planned to dedicate to my studies over the weekend.
After much internal debate, as well as seeking advice from my coursemates and one of the module tutors, I decided to follow the set brief. This will (a) allow me to remove the creative block I found myself crashing up against, and (b) help me gain some experience in following a brief I haven’t chosen for myself – just as I will likely be doing when working with clients as a UX design professional in the future.
Removing the more ‘personal/tailored’ element will also help me to keep ‘Rule Number One’ of UX – i.e. “we are not our users!” (Redish 2012: 20) – more firmly in mind throughout the design process, providing me with the necessary distance to view the project from a more holistic perspective.
1.2. SMART goal: track my perfectionism
The discussions with my tutor also highlighted an element of the creative (design) decision-making process I hadn’t previously considered: choosing a topic I’m passionate about could lead to a reduced tolerance with myself if the end result is anything less than ‘perfect’. Having less of an emotional connection to the project could, therefore, allow me to be kinder to and more patient with myself. This in turn could help me embrace the curiosity and fascination that comes with the learning process itself rather than focusing purely on the final outcome (Petty 2017: 203).
Having struggled with perfectionism on a professional, personal, and academic level, I want to put this notion to the test over the next two and a half months by reflecting each week on my own levels of satisfaction or frustration with the work I produce, using a five-point scale ranging from ‘Very satisfied’ to ‘Very frustrated’. This will allow me to map out how my perfectionist tendencies play out over the course of the module, as well as to capture which tasks, tools, and techniques resonate with me the most (see 5. Conclusions).
2. The project brief
The brief for this module focuses on generosity, specifically in the context of charitable giving and the contributions of everyday givers. According to the brief:
“People are innately generous, but the giving process can be complex, so it can be hard to find the right organisations to support, know how much to give, or understand the impact of a gift. The giving landscape is ripe for innovation that will make it easier for donors to give… Your goal is to optimise and reimagine tools and products that will help all donors give more and give better.”
On initial reading, it struck me that several of the statements in the brief are in fact assumptions that need to be validated through user research. How generous do people actually perceive themselves to be, versus how generous are they in reality? What forms of giving do they actually engage in and/or prefer (e.g. time, money, skills)? How complex do they actually find the giving process? What barriers (if any) are they actually facing?
2.1. Self-criticism: jumping to solutions
False assumptions about our users can lead to the creation of what Sharon (cited in De Voil: 62) terms “assumption personas”. If we base our decisions on these personas, we will likely end up creating products that are ill-suited to our users’ actual needs. What’s more, we could begin to solutionise based on what we think our users want and need without actually defining the problem space from our users’ perspective.
This is exactly what I found myself doing at the start of the week while I was trying to come up with a project topic – jumping straight to potential design solutions for various vaguely defined subject areas, all without speaking to a single user!
My core focus this week, then, was to uncover my potential users’ own stated behaviours, attitudes, experiences, motivations, pain points, goals, and needs in relation to the topic of charitable giving.
3. Research
To uncover my users’ actual rather than imagined needs, I carried out some targeted secondary research and arranged one-to-one interviews with six prospective users.
To shape both of these activities, I began by focusing on the initial problem statement and hypothesis:
Problem statement:
“I need a way to easily donate the resources I have available (time and skills), because it can be complicated to find causes that welcome these things instead of money.”
Hypothesis:
“We believe that by creating charitable giving solutions that are more accessible, inclusive and effective, we can reinforce a culture of generosity.”
3.1. Depth of insight: enhancing my practice – secondary research and VARK learning styles
Before conducting the one-to-one interviews, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the problem space to get a better feel for the charitable giving landscape in the UK, as well as how this area has been addressed in the field of UX design to date.
In my assignment for the first module of my MA, I reflected on my learning style, observing that I had a preference for ‘Read/write’ input and output within the VARK model of learning styles (Fleming and Baume 2006: 2). However, I also expressed a wish to experiment with modalities other than the written word, so that I can reflect on the effectiveness of different approaches on both my learning and enjoyment of the course content. This includes auditory modes of knowledge representation, such as videos and podcasts.
With this in mind, I curated a selection of podcasts (Chomette et al. 2023 and Vihn 2020) and YouTube videos (Lomelin 2022), as well as a recent report from Barclays (2022) on how technology is shaping the charity sector in the UK, to gain a broad overview of the challenges and opportunities within this space.
In my secondary research, I discovered a number of interesting and useful insights:
Financial constraints, a lack of knowledge about how donations are being used, the overwhelming choice of charities to choose from, and a lack of time are all perceived by consumers to be key deterrents to charitable giving (Barclays 2022: 3–11).
Practical giving with a focus on time and goods (e.g. spending money in and donating goods to charity shops, signing petitions, volunteering) is still prevalent in the UK, despite the current cost of living crisis (ibid: 8).
Emotional connections and personal associations are key to successful charity messaging (ibid: 12).
“Overall openness to new digital channels tends to be quite even across age groups” (ibid: 14).
Personalisation, transparency, and positive (verbal, written and visual) messaging (i.e. not guilt-tripping consumers into making a donation through language and/or imagery) can serve as effective techniques to connect donors to social causes (Vihn 2020).
“Communities can build power through collective giving and the model of ‘giving circles’: groups of people with shared values who come together to make change, strengthen their social fabric, and help diverse solutions get funded” (Lomelin 2022).
I was keen to see the extent to which these findings were reflected in the one-to-one interviews.
3.2. Depth of insight: enhancing my practice – refining my interview technique
My six interviewees deliberately spanned a range of age groups and genders to avoid limiting my initial investigations to a narrow demographic.
Learning from my experiences of interviewing my coursemate Melissa in the first challenge activity, I created a flexible interview script to help guide the conversations. I was careful to use open-ended questions that allowed participants to go into as much depth as they wished.
I also made sure not to inadvertently coerce participants into talking about specific topics if the conversation took another route, and adapted my line of questioning to match the participants’ responses. For example, even though the initial problem statement focused on donating time or skills, I did not dissuade any discussion of monetary giving where the participants naturally brought up this aspect of charitable giving themselves.
4. Synthesising my data
4.1. Breadth of analysis: exploring key skills and domains – affinity mapping
Having gathered a large amount of qualitative data from my user interviews, I used affinity mapping to identify and categorise my collected insights, observations, quotes, and behaviours. To help me identify the main overarching themes, I grouped my categories into three overarching themes:
Motivations
Barriers to participation, and
Experiences with charitable giving
While the affinity mapping exercise did allow me to identify commonalities across my research participants, I also found it challenging to create meaningful groups. Ideally, affinity mapping is conducted by a whole project team rather than an individual (Marsh 2022: 232), so I do feel that my groupings could have taken multiple directions had I undertaken the project as part of a group rather than as a solo practitioner.
I’m keen to compare and contrast my experience with affinity diagramming in this challenge activity with my experience using the same technique as part of a product design team (this is also something I plan on exploring as part of the Co-creative Design and Development Practice module later in the year).
Leaving some time between the first, second, and third iterations of my mapping was helpful, as I was able to check and revise certain assumptions that had crept in on the first pass. For example, I had originally listed ‘a lack of time’ and ‘a lack of money’ as key barriers to participating in charitable giving. This was based at least partially on the responses of the first and second interviewees I spoke to (an example of primacy bias in action (see e.g. Oyekanmi 2022), as well as my own subconscious assumptions and personal opinions about what could constitute common obstacles. This led me to create the following revised problem statement after a single viewing of the data:
"I need a way to donate to charity that works flexibly with my giving preferences, capacity, and financial resources, so that I can enjoy the experience of giving to reputable causes I have an emotional connection with and see the real-world impact of my contribution."
However, on my second and third viewings of the data, I saw that, in fact, these factors were only secondary barriers compared to the more prevalent and widely-expressed difficulty of establishing trust in a charity, as well as participants' desire to get something (particularly new skills) out of and enjoy the experience of giving.
After multiple iterations, I was therefore able to create a revised problem statement using the key insights generated from the mapping exercise, combined with the insights from my secondary research:
Reformulated problem statement:
"I need a way to donate to charity that works flexibly with my giving preferences and lifestyle...
...so that I can enjoy and benefit from the experience of giving to reputable causes that I trust and have an emotional connection with and see the real-world impact of my contribution."
5. Conclusions
This week’s challenge activity opened my eyes to the importance and benefits of applying iterative thinking within each stage of the design process. Not only do we need to continually research and test our ideas as we design wireframes and prototypes – we also need to continually interrogate and refine the insights and ideas we generate as we employ the various design tools at our disposal (such as affinity mapping).
Overthinking emerged as a key challenge for me this week. While approaching next week’s challenge activities, I’d like to practice paying more attention when my mind starts to spin – whether with solutions, assumptions, doubts, or fears – and noting down my thoughts and feelings in the moment (most likely in my private journal). This way, I can begin to recognise any patterns that might give me clues as to how, when, and why I end up in these kinds of situations and my typical thoughts, behaviours, and responses. I can hopefully then start to develop strategies to prevent these scenarios from cropping up in the first place (e.g. mindfulness, journaling, etc.).
5.1. How satisfied do I feel with my work this week?
1 = Very satisfied , 2 = Quite satisfied, 3 = Neutral, 4 = Quite frustrated, 5 = Very frustrated
Start of week (pre-activities): 5 – overthinking, full of doubt and worry, no idea where to start
Secondary research: 2 - felt significantly better once I had a better understanding of the problem space
User interviews: 2 - enjoyed the experience of interviewing, felt some doubt with my own interviewing technique, but alleviated once I did the affinity mapping exercise
Affinity mapping: 1/2 - once I got into it, I really enjoyed the process of finding patterns – felt like all the other research was worthwhile, and started to see the tangible benefits of following a research-driven (rather than assumption/panic-driven) process
6. References
BARCLAYS. 2022. ‘Giving: a new landscape. How technology is changing the charity sector’. Available at: https://www.barclayscorporate.com/content/dam/barclayscorporate-com/documents/insights/Industry-expertise-22/Barclays-Giving-a-new-landscape-charity-report.pdf [accessed 29 January 2023].
CHOMETTE, Lisa [host], Laura STANLEY, Grace MONNERY, and Ioan Marc JONES [guests]. 2023. Charity Digital Podcast – The Essentials of Effective Online Communication. Available at: https://charitydigital.org.uk/podcasts/podcast-the-essentials-of-effective-online-communication [accessed 29 January 2023].
DE VOIL, Nick. 2020. User Experience Foundations. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
FLEMING, Neil, and David BAUME. 2006. ‘Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!’. Educational Developments, 7(4), 4-7.
KURIEN, Rony, Anil Rao PAILA and Asha NAGENDRA. 2014. ‘Application of Paralysis Analysis Syndrome in Customer Decision Making’. Procedia Economics and Finance 11, 323–34.
LOMELIN, Sarah. 2022. ‘Your invitation to disrupt philanthropy’ [TED talk]. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/sara_lomelin_your_invitation_to_disrupt_philanthropy [accessed 29 January 2023].
MARSH, Stephanie. 2022. User Research. 2nd edition. London/New York/New Delhi: Kogan Page Limited.
OYEKANMI, Paul. 2022. 'Dealing with bias as a UX Researcher' [online]. Available at: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/dealing-with-bias-as-a-ux-researcher-2c0f450d0d6c [accessed 11 February 2023].
PETTY, Geoff. 2017. How to be Better at Creativity. Lulu Press, Inc.
REDISH, Janice. 2012. Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works. Massachusetts: Elsevier, Inc.
VIHN, Khoi. 2020. Wireframe Podcast – Season 3, Episode 3: How Crowdfunding Design Makes It Easy for Us to Give. Available at: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/perspectives/wireframe-podcast/crowdfunding-ux-design-encourages-giving-episode-s03-e03/ [accessed 29 January 2023].
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