Becky White Transcript

Transcript

1. 1 www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0425 904 255 UX AUSTRALIA Design Research 2020 Day 1 Thursday, 19 March 2020 Captioned by: Gail Kearney & Rebekah Goulevitch
2. 2 BECKY WHITE: Let me just get set up here. As I'm getting setup, I did want to mention, I am a senior researcher about to join Camba but this is about my work at Atalassian, I worked at Atalassian for four years and just left last week, so, interesting timing. Let's see if I can get this going... can everyone see and hear me? I hope so! I'm going to just get going here. I actually can't see you all and can't see the chat. But hi, everyone. Thank you so much for dialling in and joining me today. I hope you had a great lunch. My name is Becky White. I'm going to take you back to a time before coronavirus, where conferences looked like this. This is Atalassian annual customer conference, called Summit. Last year we held had in Las Vegas, three days long and thousands of our customers came to learn about the greatest and greatest in our products. Logic goes, if there are thousands of customers here, we should probably conduct some research to learn from them, right? But remember, the environment that we're in at a conference. People are going from presentation to presentation, booth to booth, got short attention spans. It's loud, it's crazy and a bit chaotic. How in the world can you conduct research in this environment? Well, in design, there is this idea of taking a constraint and making it beautiful, turning something that looks like a disadvantage into an advantage. That's what we had to do with this crazy chaotic conference environment. We had to reframe it from a constraint into an opportunity. And we did that through something called Workshop Walls. They are closely related to participatory design activities at scale. They begin as a giant whiteboard wall with drawings, Post-It note activities and dots. I am going to pause here to make sure everyone can hear me? Can everyone hear me? I am seeing a few things for the chat. This is awkward. I guess you can hear me. I am going to keep going. So sorry. Alright. Moving back to the Workshop Walls. Like I said, we had the crazy constraint and we got around it using something called workshop walls that are close to participatory activities but at scale. They'll have question prompts, drawings, lots of colours and post it notes. Conference attendees would walk by, they'd stop for a bit, they'd be
3. 3 drawn to these question prompts. They'd want to participate and their share opinion and an Atalassian representative would swoop in and chat. We iterated from a single wall to multiple walls and finally, this was our space last year. Lots of different activities and walls for conference attendees to come and do. So, here is why they work well in this environment. So, first all, you can see the space is really colourful, it looks really fun and it just really draws people in. We certainly weren't begging people to come in and participate in our activities or talk to us. The space kind of did it for itself. Next, the activities were really quick. As I mentioned in the conference environment, customers don't have a lot of time. They are moving from place to place. So, with these walls, we basically put the power in the customers' hands. They can stop for only a few minutes or we had some customers who came and chatted for us, for as long as 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes. The power is really in their hands. Also, they're independent. So we designed these activities to be able to completed without a researcher's help, without facilitation. Because when things get busy, researchers are all busy with different customers. The customers could still come in and give us their feedback. Most importantly, these feedback allow us as researchers to dive deep, and fast with customers. It allowed us to take the traditional customer paradigm and flip it on its head. We walked up to someone and learned about problems in their team, team dynamics or how they would love to use our company. You're not just having quick conversations, we are having rich, meaningful conversations through the shared context of this activity. Let me give you a few examples. Here we have some spectrum questions with dot stickers. These are simple dot stickers you can by on Amazon or something, we use them in a variety of different ways to create different spectrums. It is easy for customers to grab stickers, walk up and they know what to do with the dots. Then you, as a researcher, can come in and ask follow up questions. Tell me why you placed that dot there. Why do you feel that way? As you can see, we have lots of sticky notes here. As we are doing the follow up conversations we are taking notes
4. 4 throughout the whole time chatting with a customer. So we can remember those conversations. Next, we have a, take a very boring traditional matrix survey like this and make it a lot more fun with some coloured yarn. This is one of our crazier versions. But here is a better picture so you can see what's going on. We've got the answer choices on the left and across the top, customers can come, grab and yarn, and then sort of hook it around their answer choices as they go. And it's very easy for you, as a researcher, to kind of chat with them and talk to them to understand their decisions why they're answering the way that they are. Next, more stickers. We use a company called stickermule and you can get anything printed on a sticker, you can get logos or competitor logos. We used the simple numbers, one, two, and three with our Atalassian genie and we asked what are their three wishes for products and got lots of great conversations out of that. You can see some of our pre-defined options with a lot of stickers but more so at the bottom there were all these other wishes for things we hadn't thought of and were able to generate great discussion around this activity. Next we have relationship therapy. You're traditional love letters or breakup letters. The thing bout this activity it was completely independent . We didn't have any researchers facilitating this area at all. Customers would come up, see the paper and the craft materials and they'd know what to do. Year after year, we've done it several years, and I have always been blown away just how deep and emotional some of these letters can get. If you know anything about Atalassian products, you know the customers can be a bit technical, maybe nerdy IT folks but let me show you a few examples. Here is one customer reaching up, he wants the new features on the cloud products but can't just get them. And another one: Sorry, Jira. It's me, not you. We need to bring in someone to resolve our relationship. These letters are so deep and emotional it's really powerful to see them written down. We would never have been get this sort of rich data from just a five or 10-minute chat with someone coming by our booth. Finally, we have this visual stimuli here, and credit for Jay Rogers, my colleague
5. 5 who came up with the idea. He came up with the pain points of administrators and zooming in, there is the geyser of change and the chasm of trust. Customers would come by, chuckle, and take pictures, and you could walk up to them and say what's resonating with you here? And off the back, they say our company just got us fired or we're going through this huge acquisition and you get to learn about the deep pain points within a few minutes. While these walls are colourful and fun, I do want to point out that like all participatory design activities, the most valuable data is in the conversations, not the artefacts themselves. This is just to facilitate qualitative research but we are chatting with customers and participants to understand them, their context and their world view. Also, valuable, contact details. If you do this at a conference, after everything is back to normal with coronavirus, I do recommend capturing contact details so that you can reach out to these customers and maybe do a more formal interview. Maybe in a quieter environment. What if you don't have a conference? What if your company doesn't do that? Can you use these ideas? I definitely think so. There are lots of ways you can repurpose workshop walls. First of all, any time you're gathering feedback, you could use these walls to make it a bit more fun and a more visual wall. Internally, you are at a company event or maybe a team offsite or a team meet up you are organising or a heavily foot-trafficked area in the office, the lobby area, have customers participate on they way into meetings perhaps. In a public setting I would love to see them used for a an audience that is more public like a library or hospital. Customers would be more in a hurry but you can grab them for five or 10 minutes and have them participate in an activity and let them go to get the deep insight. And also use the walls to compliment more traditional methods. A one-on-one interview or a small group setting you can quickly turn a white board into one of these walls. You can always digitize them. I don't think the activities have to be done with physical walls. It's all about sort of, well, what Paul said earlier, collaborating to make meaning together. I think these activities help turn your participants into partners.
6. 6 I have so much more I would love to share with you today but I am almost out of time. I did write a Medium article about this if you would like to learn more. And take a screen shot. These are my ideas to help you craft your own activities gathered from interactive museum exhibits. I don't think we have time for questions. Thank you very much. My name is Becky White, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or twitter if has peaked your interest.