[MUSIC] >> The four dimensions you talked about earlier desirability, viability, feasibility and sustainability. Let's focus on desirability. If I'm talking to the end users, one person or five people or ten people. And I'm getting sort of conflicting requirements, how do I make sense of what's really important. >> It's also a case that if you asked people about what they do, you'll get different kind of information than if you watch them doing things. Sometimes people will answer questions, whether in interviews or surveys, with the kind of answer that they think you might want or the kind of answer you think, or that they think, a person like them should give. I always find in the process of observing people and trying to identify what their needs are, that watching what they do is actually a more effective way of establishing behavior and intention. And it also means that you have to kind of watch and listen very carefully to try and illicit insights from what people do. And also sometimes to way what they say, people's ability to do that is somewhat conditioned by what they think is possible. So there's the famous Henry Ford example that if he'd asked people, before he designed the Model-T, if they wanted a Model-T, they'd have said, we want a faster horse. If he'd asked the question, how quickly do you want to get from A to B? Like what's the purpose of you using a horse? So why are you making these kind of journeys? Then you might have got closer to that kind of answer, to that kind of insight. So observation is a very powerful tool, but it can also be a little misleading. You need to use it effectively to generate insights that you can then use as the basis for more work. >> We always see noise in data and some of the approaches say let's clean up the data and then work on it. I know this is more qualitative, but do we apply those same principals here or not? >> I mean, the problem with cleaning up the data is that sometimes you may leave the wrong things out. >> Okay. >> And so when people started using focus groups as part of their design process, which is something that really goes back probably about 20 years. Scarab put a group of users together in a room, we'd talk to them about what it is they do we show them examples and so on. Initially that tend to be done by people who were experienced in running focus groups. Psychologist and Sociologist and so on. It was found to be much more effective if you can actually put designers in to those focus groups. So they can actually hear what people were saying. Unfiltered and raw and they might then spot things which would otherwise have been kind of ironed out. Filtering is a, sometimes you have to do it just for convenience, but it's a slightly risky in terms of what you might miss. >> There's one person who uses a power drill in a particular way and everybody else in another way. Are we excluding that user from our set or not? >> There's some very interesting interviews with designers in the film Objectified. That if anybody's interested in design processes the authority recommend that to one of the people from small design gives a very good account to this. It says we're interested in users but we're not interested in the average users, because that doesn't really tell us very much. Well they're interested in extreme users. And that can be people who are not very experienced and not familiar with a particular device. To take your example of an electric drill, it may be people who don't use one more than three or four times a year. A little bit frightened about it, not sure what it can do but they know it's a little bit dangerous. So that can give you useful information about how you communicate what the thing does and how you make it safe. The other extremes of users are people who use electric drills 12 hours a day. Six days a week and so on so they're very contractors, professionals, builders and so on. So, they would give you lots of information about durability, reliability the kind of things that wear out, the kind of things that need replacement. Those are the two groups that will give you useful insights and In terms of how you might design it more effectively. >> As for the viability and the feasibility and the sustainability of these, are these sort of integrated into the process or do we do them at particular stages? >> It's useful to be aware of those different considerations at all times, even if you're focusing on what's technically feasible, what kind of business model might actually work. Or looking in detail at the kind of things that people might need or want. If you bear all of those three things in mind, I think that there is more chance that what you end up with is going to satisfy things in those three categories. Then if you say, well, okay, we're going to start of just thinking about people ignoring this other stuff, and then later on it comes in, and we can't keep on ignoring it. We might bring it in later, and then there are some things that maybe are not possible, or just going to be really expensive. Given that you want to come up with some kind of balance solution. That's the point about the three or four spears that it's useful to bear them in mind from the beginning. [MUSIC] [SOUND]
