Karina Smith & Alexandra Almond 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 KARINA SMITH: Thank you. It is great to be here. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I hope you are relaxed at home, it is getting to the 4 o'clock period where you can open your beer if you want to and relax into it. We will run a fun session and have activities, hopefully we can do them and try them out in the essence of prototyping. Thanks, Steve, we'll get into it? STEVE BATY: I can hear you both. KARINA SMITH: Fantastic. We would like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we are both sitting at the moment, me in my kitchen in Melbourne. I'm on the traditional owners of my land are the Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung and Boon wurrung. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I'm the Gatiga people. It is lovely to be doing it cross country today. Who are we? Karina and Alexandra, we have worked a bit over the last six months. We are both really passionate about prototyping. We love trying things out, both in our lives and work so we wanted to share with you the things we have learned through doing it with different types of organisations. And just also a little insight into one of the things we prototyped recently, for the speech. For me, this is my niece and she is obsessed by the show Nailed it. She said the cakes, people don't want to eat them? They are quite disgusting? So I said, let's test it. She found the recipe, a disgusting rolled meringue with edible glitter and she went around and tested the family and neighbours to see if they would eat it. 30% did. I love she has openness for experimenting and learning. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: That's awesome. That is my dog, my partner, Pete, doesn't like dogs and they didn't want another dog but my friend had a dog to be looked after so I brought in Captain, who came in for weekends and then weeks and months and now he is permanently our dog. It was a way of introducing Captain into our lives in a way that was not dramatic and he is always beautiful and I am happy we did that. KARINA SMITH: Full exposure therapy ALEXANDRA ALMOND: That's right. The reason we wanted to say that and do that, over the last probably five years, the way that we are prototyping has changed. The things we are prototyping and what a prototype is and what it can do for you is changing. So we wanted to kind of open that up as a, hey, it's not necessarily what you think it is. That's what we're doing. What we're going to do today is open your minds, open our minds and everybody's minds to the extraordinary power of prototyping. We want to shift the mindset about what prototyping is actually. Explore different ways of prototyping, beyond the digital. Because actually, it is the physical prototyping that is much more fun. And we are going to have a little bit of a chat about ways to measure and evaluate prototypes as well. KARINA SMITH: So, what is prototyping? We looked and looked for different definitions of this. Wikipedia doesn't do a bad job, which is amazing. An early sample, or release of a product build and we want to
3. 3 test whether it works and it is to be learned from. We love it has the learning in there and we are going to talk to you about that this afternoon. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I don't mind Wikipedia's definition but I have a better one, a thing you use to provoke a response, that simple. Trying to provoke a response, now I want to change this because I want to put learn in there, provoke a response that you can learn something from. That's what we're talking about and what we're doing today. KARINA SMITH: How we use prototyping, did you have something more to say there? ALEXANDRA ALMOND: No, I was probably to say what you're going to say. In case you realise, we work together quite intuitively and flexibly. We haven't worked out who is talking to what slides. We figure we will make it up as we go along. KARINA SMITH: Which is easier to do when you're in the room together. It is a big test we are in today. Prototyping, how we traditionally thought about it is that it comes after we have done some idea generation. We get together ideas and put them out in the world and they might be digital prototypes, testing how things are laid out on screen or content and how people respond to words and it might be physical things like handles on pedals. If we put it out there, we want to make sure it works. Whether the idea or the aspect works that is what we are trying to work out. We don't want to have failures when we put them out in the world. It is really coming as a way of testing our thinking once our thinking is somewhat formed. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: However, what I was saying about the way we've prototyped in the last years has changed, we have moved much more into the first diamond. So using prototyping, in an earlier space than necessarily just testing something that you think is the right solution or that might be the right solution. So, Leisa talked this morning about the question having changed from can we do customer research to how do we control all these people doing customer research, all of the time with all of the people. Benjamin also talked about in his talk about research repositories that organisations have moved on from knowing nothing about customers and not thinking about customers to having a whole lot of knowledge about what the customers are doing and how things are working for them and the problem they have is not having that knowledge, but knowing what to do with it. We find ourselves more and more often going into an environment we have a whole lot of existing knowledge and that is where we need to start from. But we know from starting from the hey, we know this is a bad idea. We actually bring the prototyping forward and use the prototyping in the first diamond to be a bit hypothesis led but to start from somewhere, put a thing out in the world and then provoke a response you can learn from. It is a way of blending the what we already know with the, we do need to get to the heart of people, we still want to do research and touch with people and understand them. Its picture not just about testing something at the end. KARINA SMITH: That's where getting into the prototyping mindset, we
4. 4 believe it is being open to learning about something you didn't expect to. It is not to say we put something in front of you and ask questions, you are going to tell us the answers to things we ask, it is being open to say we put a provocation out there but we don't know what we're going to learn from that. We don't know whether it's actually something completely different to actually expected from this experience of actually trying something out with someone. We might learn something completely new about that person, their needs or completely knew about the way they go about interacting with an idea or model that we've put there. That's what we're trying to do, not focussing on the thing we are trying to learn from, we are using that thing as a way to learn more about them, their experience and their needs. We have to be really open to that and not focussed on just watching what they do with that but what they say, what else is going on around them, what that might mean in their lives and shift the direction about how we think about the problem. So, we really see the role of prototyping being about this, rather than testing and the traditional testing of ideas, we are oscillating much more into the learning side of things and going back into that testing. It is about moving around the figure eight. It might be in the first stage of learning, as Alexandra said, based on everything we know we take out some hypothesis. It is not to test whether they are right or wrong but they can help us delve deeper into the areas of interest, the lines of inquiry, to help us understand more. As we get those refined we are going to test and remote and build concepts and build them but it is helping us deepen our understanding of who our cohort are rather than just testing our ideas. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Sorry about that, I have a slightly different diagram for that. It is the same, I think it is saying the same thing but just in a slightly different way. Which is that what we're doing with prototyping is oscillating between the problem space and the solution space. So, we are instead of just going directly from one it the other, what we are doing is oscillating backwards and forwards and using what we know about the problem space to inform what might be a potential solution and then using what we learn about that to go back and what is that telling us about the problem? Backwards and forwards all the time. I didn't invent that diagram, I heard about it from Jeremy but whenever it came from, it has got lost but I would be happy if anyone knows. It is probably Jeremy. KARINA SMITH: We talked about it is more than testing ideas, it is helping us learn and understand deeply about our cohorts and who we are designing for. How do we go about this? We have done lots of prototypes in our life time and it is a creative exercise in itself. But there is a method how you would prototype something based on what you want to learn. Here is the diagram we float about a lot at Meld and we have clients who say let's get into something detailed straight away, particularly from the digital world but we look at things on a scale that is not linear, which is why the squiggly lines, to the more descriptive prototypes where we don't have much time or we are not confident in what we're developing so it enables us to develop lots of ideas and put them out in the world and share them with lots of people and get quick feedback right back to more immersive prototypes that take more time to set up and more investment for an organisation to get going right through to a pilot. We are going to
5. 5 show you examples of things at all these different scales. Of course, it's not actually linear. Sometimes you might move back and forth between the things as you are learning. If you think about entire service experience, you're not prototyping once, a service lives on. It has a BOU, an operational component you are trying to improve. You might be in an immersive experience or pilot or live and moved back to descriptive prototypes to see issues in the current service or where you might be trying to improve the service as well. We see it as a more fluid thing than a straight line going up. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We have examples of these that we want to share with you and to talk about the things you learn from the different sorts of prototypes. The first slide we have, this is concept cards. I am sure you are familiar with concept cards as a thing you put in front of people to provoke a response that you can learn from. What we did from these, lots of concept cards and got the participants to sort them into, no, I don't think so; good idea; game-changer or a no strong opinion option there. It gives you a quick almost quantitative measure if things are working or not. It isn't what bucket they sort them into that is necessarily the most interesting thing, it is the combination around that, why is that interesting to you? It is because extremely unlikely at this early stage with 20 or 30 or 40 ideas one of them is the idea. It is going to be an amalgamation or combination of something you learn about because you are exploring it with people. It is not because this one got the most game-changer votes, therefore it is the winner, it is not the way it works. It is a provocation with how people are thinking about the way you are thinking. Are they thinking the way you are thinking is another way to look at it KARINA SMITH: We create the concept cards and create them in a way that is lose and not a lot of detail in them. We want our people who we are working with, customers, frontline staff, whoever the people are who are involved in the service or the touch point to be able to contribute to that and tell us how they would like things to be. So, sometimes we have kind of put something that has a very lose diagram and they say, what would happen in that? We say, what do you think would happen? What would you like to see happening? We are almost forcing them with the loseness and the lack of detail in there to contribute how they might like to see things unfold. So that's where the looser that we've got it at this stage we're actually giving them something that is quite hypothetical and empty because we are using it as a technique to learn from them. Rather than feedback itself, it is something that helps them give us more information from as a starting point. This is an example of how you can actually zoom in between a service experience and a touch-point experience and also an example of learning something unexpected. So, when you are actually testing something and it might be that you've got a particular touch point that you're involved in, a sales conversation or interface that someone is working with, in this case, it is an interface here, it is important to test it in the end-to-end experience. Putting something into the service will have upstream and downstream effects and you want to test that. If just test the touch point you won't know the impact until you put it into a semi real situation. We want to know it early on. When we have testing the system, a paper prototype with cards, we would walk the customer or staff member through the experience how it might be end to end first and at particular points in
6. 6 time we might delve in and use the paper prototype of our new system to give them the experience of what using the tool would be like. The tool itself failed dismally in this scenario. And it wasn't a wasted experience. Because the thing we learned was so unexpected. We sat a customer and front-line staff member side by side to do role playing. Normally they wouldn't sit opposite each other. They told us how they loved the dynamic of sitting side by side and a shared experience, the power dynamic was better. We moved aside the tool and looked at more at the interpersonal relationship and how important it was to those people. Totally unexpected thing we didn't design for but really helped us shape our future service experience. This is another one, which is a really interesting when you see the progression and I know Leisa was speaking earlier today, work we were doing with DTO when they were DTO, not DTA. You can see here we've got three views of what is the same thing. We were moving towards a single platform for government, gov.au. We started with concept cards because if we put an interface with people straight up, even the middle interface that was sketchy, they would give feedback on the interface and the content not on what this might be. We went out with conceptual ideas because we needed to understand what the interaction with government would be if it was in one place and where government might intersect with them now or not. Rather than delving straight into the interface, which we got the wrong feedback for at the time, we started with the concept cards. Once we learned that we went into low fidelity prototypes and finally a mocked up prototype. If we went straight out where the full version that was very high fidelity, people focus on the detail. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Another perfect example here. Two versions of the same thing. We were working with a Victorian government service provider to redesign the service centres, what the physical service centres looked like. The diagram on the right is the one we went out with first, the hand drawn. Let's talk about stuff, what this looks like, how it works. And we got really great feedback. We had people tell us things like, yes, the concierge is at the front and it might be in the way but you can't miss them. Worried about the benches and the privacy counters, they were giving us feedback. The next iteration, we had cool 3-D software to mock up the diagrams super quickly, and they looked so much cooler and we felt more professional but it is effectively the same diagram and the feedback was almost exclusively about the furniture. Almost exclusively it was why would you have couches in that place. Are they stools? Would people sit on stools? Don't make the concierge sit at that. What is the tables with chairs? I am serious, that is the feedback from just one person, from everybody just with that, it's the same thing, it's not even that much more high fidelity but it is all people with focus on, not the space, they are focussing on the things in the space. We reversed back, and even our final deliverable to them, that informed the final deliverable because there were going to be architects and stuff, people looking at not having been involved in the process but expected to design spaces so we made it a really flat, boring looking structure. I actually did originally have our final version to show you but we can look at it another time. Cool. This one is the State Library of Victoria and we put this in to show low 5 can also be low-fi. You can design physical spaces, test physical spaces in a low-fi way. The space was being used as a library during the day and could only test after hours so we couldn't change anything. You
7. 7 had curtains and rugs covering thing. And for our testing we said please imagine this is not here. And it works, it does the job. You have got to need to find out what you need to know but you can find stuff out by doing low-fi physical testing. We didn't time these very well, three in a row for you and now three in a row for me. This is the other end of the scale. This is super high fidelity. This is Melbourne's new trains, they are meant to be live but I'm not sure, they are coming online, this is the new trains and a life-size real version of a new train in a ware house and we were testing passenger movement. We have a video to show that we'll try to see if we can play the video. We'll see whether it works. (Video plays) this project was about testing aspects of the new train design for Melbourne, out of the mockup physical replica size and did a whole bunch of simulations to test what the train is like. Into groups to help us to tell them when to get on and off the train. With the allocation into a group, they were allocated a mood like, I'm running late, or I've had a bad day. Our first stop, B, C, D, E and F are getting on the train. The important thing is this is task-based. So we give people a job to do and then watch them. We don't tell them what we are looking for because we are not trying to influence their behaviour. Most of it is really tick-box feedback. It is things like where were you seated or standing. Did you have something to hold on to. And then at the end of each trip we get them to be a bit more open and give them two pages and say, so, tell us how you're feeling. When you look at things together and understand them from a whole different point of view that's when you get insight and you start to understand what is really happening. And that's why it's valuable. There is the train we are buying, it is the state government, we want to make sure it is right. The passengers because they will end up with the better customer experience and the journey and the contractor we are working with, will help their design and make sure they deliver a product and a train we want. We have learned a lot about network and what else we might do for trains on the network. (End of video) I'll go. I was just going to say the really interesting thing about that, that was so much fun, the most fun prototyping I have had because you don't offer get to have that level of fidelity to test it, it is really cool. But in my honest opinion, most of the stuff we learned we could have learned with the ware house and chairs and chalk mark lines. There is something it helped us to learn in more detail but how many people move and fit could have been done much earlier on. The advantage to doing it earlier on is by the time you get to this stage, you're just double checking that everything works the way you expect it to. Whereas now, it's actually quite hard to change by the time you've actually built the train. KARINA SMITH: This also provided a lot of insight though if we think about the learning opportunity, it goes back to public transport Victoria as well. While you were testing it, it provided new insight to help them in future projects. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Absolutely. KARINA SMITH: So, another example we want to share, which is also on the kind of more pilot side of things but shows evolution, we were doing work with Myer to look at some new in-store experiences for them. You can see in here there are things like a coffee bar and there is a sort of a click and collect, this is quite a while ago, a fulfilment hub, before these
8. 8 things were mainstream, before click and collect was really there. What happened, this got transformed into a pilot which was exciting to see that evolution but they went the to pilot quickly because they had the technology and the space, we thought why don't we test this? We had a really interesting approach. Every two week we injected stuff into the store, the new hub experience. We tried them out and did qualitative and quantitative research and talked with staff and customers and iterated on a two-weekly basis and it went on for months. We tried thing with actual customers and staff that helped inform what the final product might be. We created reports that showed qualitative reports and monitor how things change over time. If an action happened, what were the ricochet events and how did it go if we introduced something new? A tech experience or an alert or gave them a link to do something, how are the things interacting together? Because it was sophisticated and they had the technology it allowed us to learn from the experience might be. It wasn't the intention to go with a hub but a way of learning what the retail experience might be in the future. Just a few things that we want you to remember when we have been talking about what think prototyping is about or can be about and how you might go about doing it. A few things: It's about learning, not just testing. Not just about validating what you got and making sure that that works but it is an opportunity for us to open our minds in a different way by putting something in front of people to learn about their experience and their needs and things like that. If we are a company that knows a lot already, as many people have been talking about, take a hypothesis-led approach. Use what you know, form something, and take it out there to get more deeper insight from. The other thing is choose a prototyping methods based on what you learn, not on what you can do. As you have probably seen, the lower fidelity prototypes give you feedback. Depending on what you learn, have fun and play with the prototyping methods that might best suit learning those things. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: You'll learn so much stuff from whatever prototype you put out there. It doesn't matter how basic it is. You can learn something from it. So, don't be worried and get your prototype right because the point is it is not might to be right, it is meant to be something you can learn from. Try generating on the fly with participants. Go into your prototyping sessions with a whole, here is something I've put together, and based on your feedback, how many we come up with something different? The generative kind of research and prototyping. It works really well. Try not to just test the touch point, the moment in time or the thing that you're looking at. I think we're all familiar with this. In terms of needing to look out at a bigger context. Beyond what you're looking at, you need to test the experience and the context that sits around it, not just your thing. And primarily, just be open to the unexpected. You don't know what you're going to find out. So, don't just look for what you expect. Look for what you don't expect. Things that surprise you. It's the most fun. KARINA SMITH: Cool! ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Let's do this, a 30-second activity. We were doing a workshop yesterday that got cancelled and this was one of the things we were going to in the workshop and we thought we can do it here too,
9. 9 why not? Qantas is introducing stand-up flights, let's see between Sydney and Canberra, get more people on the planes to stand up for the duration. We just want you to think about what would they need to find out and how could they find that out? And maybe put your - can we see the Q and A? KARINA SMITH: We can put it in the chat. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Sure. Just have a think about that and put your answers into the chat. We will see what we can find. I actually can't see the chat on my iPad. You're going to have to read out people's answers. KARINA SMITH: As they come through I will read through them. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I'm sorry if you can hear Captain snoring in the background. I apologise. I thought he would wake up when I started talking but no, hasn't even lifted his head at the same of his name. KARINA SMITH: The answers will be saved post conference. Some of the things seeing through, what would need to happen in an emergency, turbulence, enact. It is moving so fast, how close is too close? Very pertinent. What if someone faints, travelling with kids, my goodness, can you imagine? The seating structure, room for medical staff. How do I drink my coffee? So important on those 6:30 flights. Oxygen marks from the top? This is fantastic. We will use these because we will run it in the future. Drinks cart! We maybe just need wire or beer to come from the... ALEXANDRA ALMOND: They are brilliant. I am love them. How about how you would learn that? That seems to be simulations but I'm sure there are ways you can do that without having a plane, ways to find out the things without necessarily having a plane. KARINA SMITH: We've got things like an actor in a hallway. A card game. Role play. Watch people on the train right now, because they're standing up. Experiment in closed space, markup chalk the plane dimensions. Use the bus, it's the same. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: This is great. I love it. I just thought about what about using a bouncing castle? That is an unusual movement to get people in? This is terrific. I'm glad we did that. KARINA SMITH: Yep, that's for being part of our Zoom experiment, everyone. Practicalities! We want to prototype all these things but what does it mean to set up the different types of scenarios and do things? We just want to start with a little bit of - it has been talked about a lot today but why start from scratch in our research. We are big advocates for re-using what's out there. One of the starting points for most of us in our work now is to try to uncover from different people what they already know. But the reality is that doing research is very comfortable, it's interesting and fun. We love finding out new things and we as designers and researchers can be an arrogant bunch and we think the people before us haven't done it as well or it's not in the form we need. It depends on the experience and skill level of the researcher, whether they feel comfortable reaching this type of way. The other thing, we don't know
10. 10 what others already know. It can be hard to get access to previous research or other department's research or research from another industry or another organisation. And taking action is actually a lot harder. This is speaking for myself, I am someone that, we can find it nice to sit in this research space. However, we think prototyping is a very valid form of research. Here are some ideas to think about when you plan it. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: OK, planning and running prototype sessions. So, know what you need to learn. That was the first exercise that we did in the first question in terms of Qantas and you came up with hundreds of different things that you might want to learn or might need to learn in terms of that. So, actually getting an understanding from your stakeholders of what of these is important and how do we need to find them out. What are the different ways you might learn one thing? When you figure out here is what we need to learn, it is about all those things to do with passenger comfort but I think safety is probably going to be their primary thing, what are all the different ways you can learn that? There is more than one, I guarantee you there is more than one. Working within constraints... KARINA SMITH: That's - try more than one - each of those different ways of prototyping will teach you something different about the topic area. Run three or four different prototypes to learn different things. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yep, good point. Working within constraints, I find constraints, how you will actually come up with something really interesting. Constraints are not a barrier, constraints are just the space in which you are playing. So, you give me a problem and some constraints and I guarantee, Karina and I can put our heads together and come up with a way to prototype that, several ways, that will teach us something. You want to get feedback from lots of different people. We have clients time and again, who bring us their favourite customers to at the ideas on. They like to test their ideas with their people who know them and like them. And there's actually no point in doing that. Even having that discussion about trying to broaden it to people who are not your customers because you can learn stuff from them or people who really dislike you or people who will never be your customers, what about testing it internally as well? The risk people and the legal people and get all of these people to test as well. KARINA SMITH: The other important thing about that is diverse communities. I know with the training testing you can people with different needs as part of that research and it's really important that we go to those edges and we involve those people as much as possible. Because often it works for them, it is going to work for everyone. We really are trying to up our game in that space. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We are, I will ask Askable a callout, given they are a sponsor of the conference, to look at how we broaden and expand the people we recruit for customer research and testing. Sure, we've got a brief and we need people in the hunt for a credit card but it is not to say within the people you can't prioritise interviewing with people from diverse backgrounds or communities that are otherwise unrepresented or
11. 11 a whole lot of different stuff you can do. We're working with Askable to say how it is the default rather than we are doing transport and need to look at people with accessible needs. The last thing is about logistics on the planning side. The more you put it in, the more you get out. I don't know why we put it there, we are the let's try and see. KARINA SMITH: With the train one, you did need to plan. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We did need to plan for the train one but for the most part, I think Paul said it earlier today as well, one of our colleagues, everything's a prototype. Out put it out there and if it doesn't work you know what to do different next time KARINA SMITH: Yes, learn from experience. Running the sessions, it is important to keep your mind open and I love it, the windscreen wiper, everything you think they will say and assume will happen with the thing, whether it is a concert card or an experience, keep your mind open and watch out for the unexpected. Everything they do is valid. If it doesn't work for them, which I said when we were doing the system design thing for them and it didn't work, for the first half an hour afterwards we were getting and then, my god, look at the other things we found out through that experience. The other thing is be flexible. Be open to using that session to be pivoting in the moment. A customer or a participant may go on a tangent and you think let's pull out the piece of paper and start to draw out what it looks like and forget the thing we were testing for the session. Be flexible in yourself to say the session might not run in the way we planned it but that's OK because we want to learn things. And the other thing is active listening. It is hard when you have put something in front of someone, even five minutes and it is not going well, it is not about selling it to them, it is about us listening to them and their experience of this thing or anything to do with this service proposition, a touch point, and being open to listening to that and not sort of saying, "Oh, really, please like it! Please like me!" ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Cool. We just want to make a quick note given the context we are in, nearly everything can be done virtually, actually the train testing probably couldn't have been done virtually but most things there is a way to prototype virtually. Role plays over the phone, card sorting, lots of tools out there that can help you to do this. And we've got a document which we'll share afterwards on the socials but Meld Studios put together a working document you can contribute to. It is our tips and tricks and hints, it is a Google dox so everyone can comment and make suggestions. It would be really useful. So, just before we finish this session, we want to talk about how to get feedback on your prototype. And I think, like, this is the most critical thing. When we are talking about a prototype, just remember it's the thing that you put in front of someone to provoke a response. When you get that response, accept the feedback. Say, thanks! Or, that's a great point. Even if you think it's the worst thing you have ever heard and it's stupid, paste a smile on and say thanks, that's a great point. So you're listening, write down what they say and stick it on a post-it note on the wall or scribble it, if you are doing it digitally, see that they can see you are making notes against what it is you are talking about. Ask open questions. Your open questions are things like tell me more about that? When I have been teaching people,
12. 12 junior designers or not designers who are trying to do this, how to do research for the first time, any kind of research, will quite often try to restrict them say nothing more than just nod and yes, and that's interesting, tell me more about that? That the only thing they are allowed to say because it is restrictive but it means the conversation is driven by what the participant wants to tell you, not what you want to hear. Let them do most of the talking. The don'ts? Don't answer questions. Sorry, I think you're on mute? KARINA SMITH: Have we got time to run a bit of a role play for this as well? Yes, I can see Steve nodding. So, we are going to give you an example of this, because we love doing this role play. Don't answer questions, ever. That is going to be really hard. Someone will say how will that bit work and you want to answer the question, but go back to them and say, "How do you think that might actually work?". Don't talk about your own experiences. There is not swapping stories, not a formal pub conversation, he said, you said. And if they give you an answer about something, ask why. Don't assume you know why they have given you the answer. Why is your best and easiest question to ask. The five whys come into play. Let's play it out, Alexandra. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yes, let's do it. Here is one I prepared earlier. A concept I would like to share with you, Karina. Can you see that? I can't actually see myself? I have no idea? Great. So, Karina, this is an example, an idea that I would like to run past you. So, the idea of seeing we are working from home, Meld Studios moved from two studios, one in Sydney and Melbourne, to 20 studios in homes around the country. We thought we would install a permanent video camera in everyone's home, their work space, whenever they are working, that is on all the time. No need to dial in all the time, you are there, online, and everybody thinks you're connecting because it is like being in the office. I just wanted to check with you that was cool. That we are going to do that? Cool. That's OK, isn't it? KARINA SMITH: I don't know. I know we are working from home, but what about my privacy? ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Obviously, people need to agree to it but I don't think that needs to be a problem. It is fine, we get along well, it is not like we've got secrets, it will be fine. Everyone will be fine and we'll get them to sign a form. KARINA SMITH: I live in a house with other people and this is going to chew up my band width as well. I can't see how it will work. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We've thought about that and got that completely sorted. We know about technology. It's not like this is a new thing, we can sort it. KARINA SMITH: It sounds like you've got it covered but I'm not sure. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: No, we've got it covered so I'll sign you up. Wipe that clean in case everyone didn't realise it is the bad example. We do this role play on giving and receiving feedback and it makes you feel bad.
13. 13 How do you feel, Karina? KARINA SMITH: Bad! I feel unheard. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We exaggerated obviously but the thing is, a lot of time when people put their ideas out there, they think it is a sales pitch and they have to sell their idea and they are invested in this being the thing they want to happen so they need to convince you or shut you down so that their idea still goes ahead. But the other way this happens is much, much nicer and more open. So let's try this again. We've got this idea of a permanent video, because we're all working remotely and we want to stay connected and the whole dialling in business and having to set your pass words and that sort of stuff is really confusing and time consuming and annoying and we want to video to be on all the time and no natter what you're doing you can see the rest of the Meld people and feel connected like a family. What do you reckon? KARINA SMITH: I love you are trying to help us connect because it is new and strange for us so I like you're trying to help bring us together when we're all essentially alone. I am a bit concerned about the privacy aspect though. Have you thought through how you might deal with that? ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yes, it is really interesting one. What do you think? How do you think we should and could manage that? Because that's really important? KARINA SMITH: I suppose we could start by teaching everyone to put mute on? I mean, that would cut out the sound and things, we are not hearing everybody else around. When you're not on you're on mute, which might protect us a little bit. That's one way ALEXANDRA ALMOND: That's one way, I love that, what else? KARINA SMITH: Perhaps contain it to one room so we've got dedicated spaces where we are working and let other people know we're living with that space on video. And if you're in that space you're on video but if not kind of containing it a bit. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yeah, I like that, that's really cool. Terrific! What else? This is great. KARINA SMITH: I think, look, I really like this idea of it we're not having to connect in and out because that can be kind of annoying so the permanent is good but I'm worried about my band width ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yeah, I wonder how to figure out. Do you want to test it and see how it goes? KARINA SMITH: That's a great idea. I can get other people I live with to watch Netflix, four people watching Netflix, livestream and it works in that, we're covered. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: OK, that's great. And your neighbours will get to watch Netflix.
14. 14 KARINA SMITH: Brilliant. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Let's give it a go. As you can see, that was a fundamentally different conversation and it is not just because it was friendlier, I was being more open and asking open questions and I was not and answering her questions. And she was couching her feedback in a way that was acceptable to me, saying I really like what you're trying to do and have you thought about these things? KARINA SMITH: This is a really good technique when prototyping with internal stakeholders particularly. You can't necessarily set this up as easily with external participant but we do, when we are looking for feedback on prototypes for internal stake holders give a briefing and it can be helpful in much more productive critique rather than criticism or fear about giving feedback. Shall we move on? A few little minutes on measurement? ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I think we have three minutes left. How do you measure the effectiveness of your prototype? This is how long is a piece of string question, because it depends on so many things. Where you are in the process, what you're trying to learn, how confident are you in what needs to happen next? That is the measure of all of them, how confident what needs to happen next? No matter where you are in the process. We were going to talk about quantitative and qualitative measures, the closer you are to a pilot or going live you will want quantitative measures, but early on they won't be helpful because what you're trying to understand in the early stages is why people like certain elements or certain things and because all of your feedback is about building and developing your product or service not about selling it, necessarily. The answer to this question is a bit: It depends. However, and I suspect, Karina, maybe you want to talk about this, one of the key things that is really, really important in getting measures for your concepts and your prototypes is actually making sure you have considered all of the possible lenses on whether this is a good thing to do? KARINA SMITH: Yes, so we tend to do an activity we call concept destruction but it is about pulling apart your ideas, when you're starting to get-feedback that the ideas you are pushing forward, to get a whole lot of stakeholders together in a room, people involved in implementing your ideas, external stakeholders who might be touching it. Say you're doing a piece of development, the council, the developers, the engineers, all these people together, to really get into that detail of that concept and say what would be like if we built it? It is desirable from the a customers' point of view but what the about the business, is it viable and has the business the capacity and is it ethical. If we put it out into the world, will it have negative impact? We tend to do these sessions together so that everybody is still building a better understanding of those interdependencies and the viability of these and feasibility of the natures and the impacts of it. They are generative, collaborative sessions so we can understand what it is going to be like to put the concept idea in the world and whether it is possible. So, how we actually do it, yeah, we run workshops together and we have those discussions together. The great thing about doing this is one, we learn from each other. So we learn a bit
15. 15 more about what risk and lee you'll need, what the developers or engineers if that is the people to be involved but also as people who might be involved in generating the ideas takes the personal emotional and agenda out of it. If you are learning something is not viable, start to take out, yes, people loved it but we need to find alternative ways to deliver on that. Having multidisciplinary groups in the room they can generate ways to take it out to test. It is a feedback measure and take a sanity check on what we develop and alternative methods if we need to. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: That's it, apart from questions?