Gathering information
As part of my MA in User Experience Design, I completed a module called UX Design.
This blog post was originally published as part of the reflective piece I wrote throughout that module.
Having decided on a broad focus for my project, I got in contact with Roundabout, a charity that supports homeless young people in my area. Could I design something for them?
Another group discussion
While waiting for Roundabout to respond to my email, I looked for other ways to progress with the discover stage of my project.
Having enjoyed the small group discussion I’d tried before, I decided to use that approach again. I wanted to:
Apply that research method to the area I’m focusing on for my project
Practice my facilitation skills
This qualitative research method was also ideal for the type of information I wanted to gather: attitudes towards homelessness (Rohrer 2022),(Pernice 2018).
I assumed the general public might feel unsympathetic and negative towards homeless people and that this might result in low levels of support for a charity that works in this area. So that became my hypothesis to test.
Repeating the approach that had worked last time, I brainstormed questions I might want to ask.
The text on the blue post-its reflect my concerns that homelessness might be a contentious or difficult subject matter for some, making it difficult to share their opinions openly and honestly. So, I thought about ways that participants might be able to contribute to a group discussion anonymously and decided to try out Mentimeter.
Mentimeter
Mentimeter is a tool my lecturers use during our weekly module webinars. It has a range of different features that all centre around audience engagement such as quizzes, polls and word clouds. It allows participants to anonymously submit responses to questions set by a workshop facilitator in advance. It then instantly pulls particpants’ inputs across into a presentation. We can all see the responses but we don’t know who contributed which responses. As a participant, I really liked using it and I thought that perhaps it could work in a user research context as a way to open up discussions, particularly about difficult topics.
I created the first question as an icebreaker and wrote some follow-up question ideas into a discussion guide.
My second question aimed to focus more specifically on homeless people, rather than homelessness as a broad concept.
The combined responses to both questions sparked a really interesting conversation about how some forms of homelessness are more visiable (e.g. rough sleeping and begging) than others (e.g. sofa surfing). Even though participants were aware of other forms of homelessness, their perceptions and responses were shaped by what was visible.
I found that, with this group at least, my initial assumptions about attitudes towards homelessness weren’t quite correct. There was a lot more empathy than I had realised there would be.
Reflection
What went well
I really liked using Mentimeter and I found it very useful as a tool to open up the user research discussion.
I liked that using the tool took some of the pressure of me as a facilitator. As a relatively inexperienced facilitator, this really helped me.
The first question and use of Mentimeter to generate responses worked really well as an opening activity. It achieved my aims of getting “people to feel comfortable with the process of working together while generating as many ideas as possible” (Gray et al. 2010:42). Together, we were able to start thinking divergently and open up to a discussion which resulted in some useful insights.
When I was planning the user research session, I wrote a discussion guide using the advice in articles by Kara Pernice (2018) and TheRobHayes (2019). While I was glad that I had these prepared questions as back up, I found that using the participant-generated responses created using Mentimeter were more effective as discussion points instead. This approach gave participants a more active role in the discussion and, as a result, felt more collaborative (Sangiorgi and Prendiville 2018),(Trischler et al. 2019).
What could be improved
I wrote my Mentimeter questions in a bit of a hurry. The two questions I’d written were very similar which is why participants gave very similar answers to both. Spending a little more time learning about how to write discussion questions would have resulted in better questions and a more effective discussion.
A better second question would have been something like:
What challenges do you think homeless people face?
This would have more closely followed the advice given in the Gamestorming book which says the “more ideas and variation you have, the better” (2010:42).
Future plans
Using Mentimeter to gather user research information in a group discussion seemed to work really well so I would like to use it again. However, it does have some potential disadvantages:
It would be difficult to post anonymously if there were fewer people in the group
Relying on the tool too much could hinder the development of my group facilitation skills
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GRAY, David, Sunni BROWN and James MACANUFO. 2010. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. 1st ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
PERNICE, Kara. 2018. ‘User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them’. Nielsen Norman Group [online]. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-interviews/ [accessed 14 Feb 2023].
ROHRER, Christian. 2022. ‘When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods’. Nielsen Norman Group [online]. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/ [accessed 24 Feb 2023].
SANGIORGI, Daniella and Alison PRENDIVILLE. 2018. DESIGNING FOR SERVICE: Key Issues and New Directions. Place of publication not identified: BLOOMSBURY Publishing.
TRISCHLER, Jakob, Timo DIETRICH and Sharyn RUNDLE-THIELE. 2019. ‘Co-Design: From Expert- to User-Driven Ideas in Public Service Design’. Public Management Review 21(11), [online], 1595–619. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14719037.2019.1619810 [accessed 24 Feb 2023].
Thank you for reading.
