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

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The Say Yeah team had the opportunity to sit in on some great conversations and hear some fresh perspectives on self-service, data usage, customer needs and so much more.

Conference highlights

1. Learning how to build exceptional self-service from Josh Bean.
2. Hearing from Katrina Schiedemeyer, Kamesh Moola, and Kobi Ben Meir on how even though digital services are taking over, it’s important to recognize that there are times when consumers prefer physical interaction. As CX professionals, we need to learn to balance both needs.
3. Listening to Ashley Fitzgerald, Afshin Ahangar, and John Ross’s approach to using data as a means of finding the entry and exit points on your website to understand where your company is not delivering.

Building effective self-service

Josh Bean’s talk was centred around how we can increase the productivity of help centre agents as customer preferences for self-service solutions increase. Josh listed three ways of deflecting tickets to improve the productivity of agents:

1. Having a knowledge base;
2. an online community; and,
3. a customer service portal.

During his session, Josh also walked us through a 5 step process for getting self-service up and running:

1. Project planning
2. Content planning
3. Content creation
4. Launch and execution
5. KPIs for success

This aligns with one of the key objectives we help customers achieve: guiding customers through critical product and website flows so you can better drive engagement without burdening help staff.

Balancing in-person and digital customer interactions

During this panel discussion, Katrina Schiedemeyer raised the point that while self-service and digital services are the focus of many organizations, customers may at times prefer having face-to-face or phone interactions.

Customers may have concerns that they would rather speak to someone directly to get help faster and with more clarity. Additionally, they may feel it is easier to speak with someone rather than having to dig through pages of information on a website, or being forced to speak with a chatbot that doesn’t give them the results they want.

Katrina highlighted how empathy can get lost in digital services. In trying to become more efficient and reduce calls to a call centre (with features like chatbots) for the benefit of the company, it is important that we make sure that we aren’t creating more challenges for the customer.

We need to ensure we are still providing a range of ways for customers to meet their goals, providing the personal support they may need.

Understanding consumers with the help of data

In their talk on actionable data insights, Ashley Fitzgerald, Afshin Ahangar, and John Ross discussed using the data you’ve gathered to find the blind spots in customer experience.

John Ross emphasized making use of data to determine where you aren’t delivering on your website. Using the data to discover where the entrance and exit points are on your site is valuable to understanding what makes your customers behave the way they do. Based on this knowledge, a team can brainstorm ways to fix the areas that are putting up barriers for users.

Data is there to help us discover things we couldn’t see before and plan for better outcomes.

This year’s Digital Customer Experience Summit was an exceptional opportunity to further develop your CX toolbox and connect with industry experts. We’re looking forward to next year’s conference and future events hosted by Strategy Institute!

Ready to bring new customer experience insights and practices to your organization?

We can help improve customer reach, engagement, and retention with our efficient, data-driven approach to product strategy, design, and delivery.

Get in touch

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Until March 19, 2022, you can sign up for the Service Design for the Real World: A Practical Introduction, Online Course, for free!

This program is perfect for those looking to incorporate service design into their organization, expand their current knowledge, transition into a service design role, or collaborate with those in the field.

Front stage and back stage. This service design concept illustrates that a consumer engages with some aspects of a service but there is more that happens behind the scenes to best facilitate that service.

The course ensures that you not only have an understanding of service design methodologies, but it teaches you how to apply Service Design in an organizational setting.

In this program, you will take part in a number of activities and be provided with a resource list to enrich your learning experience as you work through the 9 course modules.

9 course modules

1. Introduction to Service Design
2. Research & Discovery
3. Ideation
4. Prototyping and Testing
5. Stakeholder Management
6. Artifacts & Deliverables
7. Business Modelling
8. Becoming a Service Designer
9. Resources & Activities

For a detailed explanation of the course content visit the course website.

Service Design Course Website

The instructors

This program has been put together by three industry professionals who will also virtually guide you through your learning.

The instructors are:

1. Patrick Bach: As a Service Design & Behavioural Economics Leader Patrick has had the opportunity to speak at the Global Service Design Conference and other service design and customer experience conferences worldwide.
2. Chelsea Omel: Being in Innovation Strategy as well as Facilitation & Design, Chelsea has consulted individuals from many industries like financial services, technology, consumer packaged goods, and charities. Her experiences have provided her with the knowledge needed to guide others in surpassing difficulties and bettering their use of service design.
3. Markus Grupp: From his experience as a Design Leader, Markus has helped clients like Indigo, TELUS, Rogers Communications, and Orange/ France Telecom to embrace more human-centred design practices.

Free until March 19, 2022

This course usually costs $62.99 CAD, but if you sign up before March 19th you will have free access to the entire course.

Register here

Do you need further support with service design? We can help.

Learn more about our approach to service design.

Get in touch

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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View article in uxmag.com

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On June 25th and 26th, we’ll be immersing ourselves in talks on all things research and people-centred design practices.

This conference has always been an excellent opportunity to dive deep into research-specific areas, from the inaugural event in 2018 to today. We couldn’t be more excited to connect and hear from fellow practitioners in user research and customer insights.

Some talks we’re looking forward to include:

• What Design Ethnography Can Do For You, with Yoanna Dosouto, User Experience Researcher, Google
• Doing Foundational Research with an Impossibly Diverse Audience, with Leticia Ratkiewicz, UX Researcher, Nubank and Lucas Terra, Lead Product Designer, Nubank
• Personas are dead. Long live personas! With Amber Westerholm-Smyth, Sr. User Researcher, Ministry of Justice UK and Carolina Pizatto, Service Designer, Ministry of Justice UK
• Consensus through Convergence, with Mel Banyard, Design Researcher, The Canadian Digital Service and Jeana Frost, Sr. Quantitative Design Researcher, The Canadian Digital Service
• What Not To Do In Accessibility Research, with Samuel Proulx, Community Manager, Fable Tech Labs

These are just a few of the talks that have caught our eye over the packed two-day conference schedule! With so many talks and topics planned, there really is something for everyone.

Our team encourages researchers with any level of experience or interest in user research to sign up for a ticket and take advantage of all of the great learning and networking opportunities available.

Check out the schedule and get your ticket today.

Grab your ticket

Looking for support in accelerating your research practices?

We can help. Learn more about our approach to user testing here and get in touch to let us know more about your research objectives.

Get in touch

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