Using a generative research approach at the beginning stages of your product or service process helps ensure successful user-centred, innovative outcomes from a design sprint or project.

Whether it’s a team, leadership, or external workshop, interviews or diary studies, these approaches help your team define the problem you’re working to solve, ensuring the solution is focused on impactful user needs and organizational objectives.

Learn more about our research approach

What is generative research?

Also known as discovery research or exploratory research.

The generative research process is, at its core, focused on big-picture research and thinking to explore and confirm the problem and problem space before settling on a narrow objective for your product or service.

These processes involve open-ended explorations of needs, behaviours, and pain points with users and stakeholders to uncover the core problem that your service or product aims to solve.

Generative research typically involves direct research with users or other stakeholders, such as interviewing or different types of open-ended approaches.

The “Double Diamond” approach to design demonstrates where generative research fits into the process, at each stage of discovering and diverging on ideas for the problem and the solution.

Research methods you can leverage in generative research

There are numerous generative research methods, but below are some that you may want to consider using in your team’s research.

• User interviews
• Field research/in situ ethnographic research
• Diary studies
• Focus groups
• Workshops

And many more!

The UX Research Field Guide from User Interviews is a great in-depth introduction to each of these methods and how to implement them.

Generative research: key for your product or service’s success

Implementing a generative research phase into your design/development sprints reduces risks of investing in the wrong solutions.

Generative research can be used to:

• validate or disprove assumptions with users
• identify current user behaviour and potential future use cases or design opportunities
• validate the impact of potential solutions
• clarify the problem space you’re working in

Ultimately, leveraging generative research throughout the design process will help confirm, validate, and focus on the most impactful problem and related opportunities before investing too many resources in an ill-suited solution.

Need help getting started with user research?

We can help your team leverage research for better products and services.

Get in touch

The post How generative research improves decision-making and outcomes appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Talks we’re excited about at Remote Design Week 2021

• Designing for Cognitive Disabilities with Tolu Adegbite
• How to Deconstruct a User Interface with Bob Baxley
• Visualizing Design Tokens at Scale with Nahiyan Khan
• 70 Ways You Can Actually Measure Design Quality with Jessa Parette

Save your spot!

You won’t want to miss one of the biggest design conferences of the year. Grab a ticket for you and your team today. Team passes are available from $299-499, individual passes from $90.

Experience design as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy and experience design practices to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

The post Remote Design Week 2021, October 18-22, 2021 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

In fact, markets are more diverse than ever and are becoming increasingly so, moving us far from the wishful thinking of having a primary archetype to design for—and the hope that this will reduce product and service development efforts.

When there is no average, no archetype, no shortcut, what then?

The good news is: designing for market diversity helps your bottom line.

That’s because markets have always been inherently complex and traditionally simplistic ways of designing products and services for complex markets has limited their effectiveness.

Once you bring practices to your organization that consider the range of individuals who use your products and services—including recognizing all the intersectional factors that define markets as a series of individuals, not homogeneous archetypes or personas—you begin operating at a level that has a profound impact on both operations and customer experience.

Let’s quantify the bottom-line impact

Designing for the full spectrum of your market affords you a series of benefits. These include:

1. Discovering new market opportunities by connecting with and providing service to previously untapped areas of your market.
2. Improving customer access by removing barriers that limit access to your products, services, and content.
3. Growing engagement and conversions by providing more relevant, usable, and accessible products, services, and content.
4. Reducing the risk of human rights offences by being proactive about understanding accessibility standards, language considerations, and access rights.
5. Reducing the risk of unintentionally alienating parts of your market by being more aware of market expectations and more intentional about serving the full spectrum of your market.
6. Reducing ongoing costs by more efficiently planning and delivering products and services that serve your whole market, without the need for rework and retrofitting.
7. Reducing ongoing effort by starting on a path that makes it easier for everyone to engage with your products, services, and content.

A roadmap for organizational transformation

By avoiding boxing people in by demographics and assumptions through more intentional market definition and user research considerate of the full diversity of your market, you can more deeply understand customer intent, journeys, and behavioural patterns that influence when and how people will use your product or service.

By following an approach to product strategy and service design that is more inclusive of your entire customer base, you have the opportunity to open up market access while reducing risk across your organization.

While this approach may shift your product and service teams away from familiar design and marketing processes by doing away with archetypes and personas, this shift offers a significant opportunity to reshape your organization as an operational and customer experience leader.

Get started with inclusive design

We have established processes across both the public and private sectors for realizing the impact of designing for market diversity across your organization.

As the diversity of the markets you serve continues to grow, there’s no better ROI than inclusive design. Let’s connect to discuss how we can help bring these practices—and their bottom-line benefits—to your organization.

Get in touch

The post How designing for market diversity helps your bottom line appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The diversity of communities has radically increased over the last 100 years across racial, cultural, and other lines, including where people come together across spaces, communities, and relationships. This increased societal diversity lends itself to more diversity in the markets that make up product and service users. This increased customer diversity and resulting shifting expectations of the organizations consumers engage with make it critical to understand why and how these trends can impact your products and services.

3 global trends are increasing community diversity

Let’s explore the trends that have led to this increased diversity over the last 150 years.

1. Immigration
2. Interracial marriage
3. The increasing diversity of urban and rural regions

Immigration

Immigration has accelerated across the world over the last 50 years.

In 2019, the UN reported that the number of migrants internationally hit 271 million people, up from 84 million in the 1970s.

As people move, they take their cultures, unique lived experiences, and perspectives with them, making their new home more diverse and culturally connected.

Interracial marriage

The increasing prevalence of interracial marriage is another driver of increasing diversity, particularly in North America and Western Europe. In the US alone, interracial marriage increased from around 2% of all marriages in the 60s to more than 18% in 2015, with the curve continuing to trend upwards.

Image source: What’s behind the rise of interracial marriage in the US?, The Guardian, 2018

The increasing diversity of both urban and rural regions

While the past 150 years have seen a dramatic increase in urbanization—including the growth of urban centre melting pots of multi-ethnic communities—over the last few decades, not only have urban areas experienced an increase in diversity but so have rural areas.

Nine out of 10 rural places experienced increases in diversity from 1990 to 2010 according to The Conversation.

The World Urban forum noted that “Cities such as San Francisco, Toronto, Abu Dhabi, and Brussels are among the most culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse with 35 to 58 percent of their populations being foreign-born.”

All of these changes and shifts around the world are leading to more diverse communities and the breaking down of barriers towards new cultural and brand connections as part of a growing global cultural mosaic.

Historical approaches to product strategy and service design do not serve today’s customers

Historically, designers have worked to design for the average, intentionally normalizing how we deliver products and services to cover as much of the market as possible without putting in the effort to understand market nuance, going by the general rule being the average will cover about 80% of the market.

As growing diversity trends have accelerated, among other intersectional considerations, this average has been replaced with a mosaic of unique individuals. In reality, there is no 80% average and in fact, your audience is more likely to be individualistic than average. As such, designing for the average no longer works.

We need to adapt to serve diverse communities by serving the diversity of our customer groups, understanding behaviour over demographics, and designing for individuals, not archetypes.

Ready to get started with inclusive design?

We’re here to help. And it’s part of our DNA.

Definition: What is inclusive design?

Deep dive: Our approach to inclusive design.

Get in touch

The post How the growing diversity of customer segments and communities is impacting product and service design appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Excellence in digital transformation comes from marrying organizational objectives and capabilities with user needs, objectives, and jobs-to-be-done, while leveraging technology to accelerate all facets of product and service development.

This necessitates identifying and intimately understanding the diverse markets your organization serves, defining outcomes over features, and defining technologies and processes that optimize your organization toward improved decision-making.

In short, your organization risks profound disruption if technology isn’t a core competency.

The facets of digital maturity

Digital transformation is difficult because it covers so many factors, from research to systems architecture to continuous improvement. In total, there are 7 primary factors your organization needs to develop as core competencies:

1. Research
2. Product strategy
3. Interaction design
4. System architecture
5. Build
6. Launch and promotion
7. Continuous improvement

A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice. Within each of these areas, there are a series of capabilities and requirements to consider, as detailed in our article, “Why digital excellence is so hard to achieve.”

If your technology decision-making and operational practice are not yet mature, you may find these common challenges familiar.

Typical challenges of achieving digital excellence

1. Having limited capability in any one of the 7 key areas, where it is difficult to execute well and project team expertise is not deep enough to achieve best practices. This can increase cost significantly upfront or over time and diminish the value of products and services.
2. Trusting a single vendor to have the capability of executive across all 7 of these multi-disciplined steps, each of which requires a high level of expertise.
3. Taking a technical or engineering-driven approach led by features-first and, at best, internal definitions of need instead of taking a human-centred design approach that identifies user jobs-to-be-done and outcomes to align organizational goals and user needs.
4. Transitioning from research and strategy to product. Bridging the gap between identifying an opportunity to improve customer experience or service delivery and how this is translated to service models and products requires a unique set of cross-functional capabilities.
5. Not aligning information architecture and interface design to user mental models rather than feature lists and organizational requirements.
6. Not effectively translating from design to code, with optimized and accessible front-end code that puts the user first, where typical engineering- team capabilities are most robust at the architecture and back-end, instead of at layers where users interact.
7. Minimal continuous improvement. Using the knowledge gathered from every click and communicating with users on an ongoing basis is essential to improve service and product.
8. Lacking effective, ongoing technology decision-making. The ability to track performance, effectively run user tests and experiments, learn from data and insights, and make the most effective decisions on spending ongoing resources to drive adoption and engineering improvements.

Ultimately, success in the connected age requires a breadth of expertise and a depth of digital maturity and capability to maintain market-leading product, service, and customer experience standards.

We’ll help you grow your digital maturity towards improved product, service, and organizational decision-making

Learn more about digital excellence and our organizational needs and digital maturity assessments service, or get in touch to discuss how we can help you optimize how you work towards reduced product and service development costs and improved customer experience.

Get in touch

The post The role of technology in building market leading organizations appeared first on Say Yeah!.

A more connected world has led to a more personalized self

We have had no less than three major technology shifts that have exponentially accelerated our path towards individualism.

1. Air travel
2. Internet
3. Smartphones

Air travel

The advent of fast travel opened up our worldviews. It allowed us to interact across cultures in ways previously limited to a small percentage of the global population. Air travel enabled us to move beyond our immediate surroundings and explore the full diversity of human culture.

Internet

The internet accelerated this shift even further by not just breaking down geographical barriers but providing space for each of us to fully and authentically engage with like-minded people from any and all backgrounds and interests.

Smartphone

Then came the smartphone, with instant access to the world’s knowledge and real-time global communication at any moment in time. The smartphone’s impact continues to grow as it becomes a critical part of everyday life across the globe.

Shifting mindsets lead to shifting markets

The result of these three major shifts:

• we have removed barriers across cultures and divides;
• we’ve seen a rise of personal discovery and empowerment; and,
• increased freedom of expression and individuality.

All of these shifts continue to accelerate today as technology, cultures, and self-empowerment build momentum toward self-discovery, acceptance, and individualism.

The impact of individuality and embracing our differences means that we can no longer follow patterns of designing products and services for an average person that does not exist. We need to embrace inclusive design methodologies that design for diverse markets or risk alienating or missing out on markets entirely.

Not sure how to get started with an inclusive design process?

From our inclusive public sector work to our insurance, banking, and other private sector work, we continue to develop our inclusive design practice and bring impactful service design and product strategy outcomes to the organizations and communities we work with.

Get in touch

The post How the 150 year movement towards individualism is reshaping product and service design appeared first on Say Yeah!.

We’re thrilled to have been asked by the Scale-up Institute‘s Recovery Activation Program team to facilitate a half-day workshop on October 28 to help Grow your Business with Inclusive Digital Strategy.

Our CEO, Lee Dale, and Designer and Researcher Kate Matesic will join Amber Gillie in a half-day workshop that will help Ontario businesses understand how to grow access to their market through more intentional and inclusive design processes.

We’ll break down ways to think about your customers as the unique individuals they are, using an intersectional approach to strategy, and areas to consider when working towards a more accessible website.

It’s not too late to join!

To join this session, you just need to complete your Digital Needs Assessment.

And with more events scheduled throughout 2020 and 2021, completing the assessment will open you up to even more digital transformation, technology, and strategic insights.

Complete the assessment

Not sure how to get started with an inclusive design process?

From our inclusive public sector work to our insurance, banking, and other private sector work, we continue to develop our inclusive design practice and bring impactful service design and product strategy outcomes to the organizations and communities we work with.

Get in touch

The post Grow your business with inclusive digital strategy: a half-day workshop from Say Yeah! appeared first on Say Yeah!.

People, and the frameworks we use for understanding people, are at the heart of effective strategy and design work.

We’ve previously explored how there is no average person, which makes it challenging to use personas and archetypes to qualify an audience or user.

Why is it so difficult to group people together?

Because driving our inherent complexity is the intersectionality and fluidity of who we are.

People are complex & fluid

Often when designers or strategists talk about people or users, there’s a tendency to assume that people fit into neat, one-size-fits-all boxes that describe behaviour and experiences universally within that group. For instance, you might hear a product team talk about how something could work better for new moms, or for people from New York who don’t like pizza, or for basketball fans who visit a site once a week.

It’s not that simple, however, to understand the human complexities that make up your audience or user base. There are so many identities, circumstances, and fluid behaviours that influence your users, on a moment-to-moment basis, and on a longer-term basis.

All of the individual factors that make up identity and user contexts are most influential when we think about how they combine to influence how someone engages with products and services.

A concept called intersectionality is a better way of looking at all of the factors that can influence the use of your products and services.

What is intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a way of thinking through how factors of identity (gender, race, sexuality, class, and many more) interact with one other and form a clearer picture of who someone is.

In understanding how these factors combine, we can more deeply understand an individual user’s priorities and context of use.

Another area that is important as part of intersectional thinking is the concept of fluidity. Factors including culture, geography, mood, behaviour, abilities (temporary and permanent), different devices, and internet connections are circumstantial or ever-changing influences on user needs and behaviour.

Since many of these areas are constantly shifting (abilities, mood, place, devices), even a snapshot of who we are at this moment isn’t necessarily representative of us on any given day.

Considering how all of these factors impact one another for your users is vital to delivering inclusive products & services. Illustration by Kate Matesic

Intersectional factors to consider for your users

These factors, and infinite other factors, shape how users behave and perceive interactions, alongside their identities, and are a crucial piece of a more comprehensive lens for viewing your users and other stakeholders.

How intersectionality influences design and strategy work

Intersectionality, user contexts, and an understanding of the fluidity of your users should form the backbone of all of the human-centred design and strategy work you undertake, whether you’re looking to improve an existing product or service or create a new one.

In general, consider that any time you want to group people, no matter how you categorize them, whether, by race, age, behaviour, interests, or any other grouping of factors, every person in that group may be different across any number of other factors.

Your team may typically leverage tools like marketing personas to build out your design or product requirements. However, personas and similar generalizations aren’t well suited to the complexity of your users.

There are many other methods you can use to go beyond personas when you’re looking to engage authentically with people. These can include user states and context maps, Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), and user stories.

Learn more about going beyond personas

The impact of intersectional thinking

Making strategy and design decisions with intersectionality at the forefront will guide your team in identifying genuinely user-centric design requirements.

Once you establish these requirements, your product or service will be able to meet the goals and expectations of your users across different circumstances, contexts, and environments, and to embrace their unique identity.

By understanding how all of these factors mix and interact to form the experiences of your users, you can design your products and services in a much more intentional way. Ultimately, this means delivering products and services that can be used and loved by a much broader market, while improving the experience for your existing users as well.

Not sure how to get started with an intersectional, inclusive design process?

From our inclusive public sector work to our insurance, banking, and other private sector work, we continue to develop our inclusive design practice and bring impactful service design and product strategy outcomes to the organizations and communities we work with.

Learn more about our approach to inclusive design

View article in uxmag.com

The post Intersectionality: a critical piece of your service and product strategy, published by UX Magazine appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The pros and cons of the persona

Getting through the user research phase of a design project can seem daunting, but in reality it’s just the beginning. When you and your team get to reviewing and synthesizing your research, you’re getting ever closer to bringing your concept to life. Usually, one of the first steps post-research is to create personas.

Personas give you and your team an overview of a user or a group of users. They also outline high-level assumptions about your user’s preferences and their behaviour patterns.

An example of a completed proto-persona highlighting motivators, behaviours, and needs for a single archetype. Leah Buhley, 2013, for Rosenfeld Media.

As a tool in a designer’s toolkit, personas nudge us to perceive a possible user’s situation with greater empathy. They also spark fresh thoughts about how a product or service could be used. For digital products, a focused, task-based persona can be crucial during these initial stages.

However, if your team’s aim is to understand what your users need, personas aren’t the most effective tool. Personas alone can’t reveal how users would behave, and the contexts where they might use your product or service.

Ideally, methodical user research results in many artifacts that inform your design team’s understanding of your users. Other research tools include: customer journey maps, service blueprints, empathy maps, emotional journeys, and user stories. A combination of these methods will often lead to the best results.

Personas are great for ‘humanizing’ users, and for painting a picture of individual experiences within an archetype. However, you shouldn’t rely on them to define what larger demographic or affinity groups—especially diverse ones—might want. In these cases, analyzing a larger dataset of behaviour patterns and contexts makes the most sense.

Understanding users on a behavioural and contextual level

The Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach is a framework that focuses on how users “hire” those products and services that help them complete a task or meet a goal. JTBD frames all design requirements around how users functionally use a product or services. So instead of referencing static, presumptive, and homogenized demographic or affinity group descriptions that come with personas, you’re focused on outcomes a user wishes to achieve.

Here’s an example of framing a user need with JTBD for a digital task-management and note-taking product, like Notion or Evernote:

Job statement: The user’s key task, which they are hiring your product/service to accomplish
e.g. Keep my project notes organized when I’m on a tight deadline

Outcome statement: The user’s wants or expectations (outcomes) from using your product or service
e.g. Reduce the chances that I miss a deliverable for a project.

Since living, breathing humans are always changing their perceptions of their challenges, goals, and tools, it’s crucial to frame their needs in a fluid way, too.

Jobs-to-be-done is a perfect tool for this sort of framing, because it focuses on a user’s context and goals, rather than less-informative and generalized demographic or affinity group information.

Simply put: people are trying to solve a problem by using your product or service. Understanding what problem they’re trying to solve is far more effective than generalizing a non-task-centric group they may belong to. Knowing what they need to do is far more actionable information than assuming you know who they are by following a persona or archetype that can only hope to resemble who they may be.

Go deeper by mapping user stories, states, and contexts

Some other great frameworks to consider as you work to improve you and your team’s understanding of how people might want to use your product or service are user stories and user states and contexts.

A user states and contexts map visualizes all of the requirements and needs that users experience. Image from the Fluid project.

Moving from research to product and service refinement

Testing and refining all of the methodologies listed above will extend and deepen your understanding of your customers beyond the limitations of personas.

As you evolve your approach, patterns will emerge in your observations, and you will become adept at weaving them into design requirements.

Longer-term, you can expect to see significant benefits from this approach:

• more effective design requirements,
• better prototypes, and
• better-informed design teams operating with more empathy after understanding the needs and outcomes of real users.

The path to effective service models and products is to deeply understand your user’s contexts and needs and the outcomes you can provide to meet those objectives. The tools and frameworks we’ve outlined here can leverage your user research into JTBD and user context maps, which will seamlessly direct you into more efficient product and development strategies.

Need help getting started?

Get in touch

View article in uxmag.com

The post Understanding users by going beyond personas, demographics, and affinity groups, published in UX Magazine appeared first on Say Yeah!.