Fieldwork of Design Individual Reflection
Topic 1: Ethics, Values and Fieldwork for Design
Different ethical issues must be considered in each phase of the designing process, from planning an investigation to designing a product. Designers and people involved in developing a product must be aware of these issues and their consequences to be honest with their customers and discourage inappropriate behaviours using their products (UXPA, 2022). In the investigation phase, it is crucial to consider that the privacy and confidentiality of participants of the investigation are the priority. Participants are assured that their privacy will not be breached by reading through information about the project and signing the consent form. It is critical to follow ethical steps to maintain a good reputation for the organisations they belong to (Bruckman, 2014). Ethical steps in an investigation include being honest with participants by showing the purpose of the research with plain language, obtaining a consent form from each of them, avoiding harmful or unnecessary too private questions, and dealing with their data safely (Mortensen, 2020). Designers must remember that their participants voluntarily take their time to contribute to the research.
It is also crucial for designers to consider the social and community benefits in their design process, as products will embody the values of people involved in the production process. The design produced by designers shapes how the product will engage users, how it will be used, and how it will benefit citizens (Bruckman, 2014). Designers are responsible for creating products that enhance society's positive values, such as inclusiveness and environmental sustainability (Lilley, 2009). For example, a website with a reading-aloud feature is designed to achieve usability for people with hearing impaired. Another responsibility of designers is to avoid dark patterns that use their knowledge to guide users involved in something that is not in their best interest (Gray et al., 2018). Dark patterns include designing products unnecessarily complicated for users, hiding information from users and forcing users to take specific actions to go further. Such inconvenient designs are against the code of ethics. Designers should be able to articulate the ethical value in their design to other teams, like engineers and their stakeholders, to fulfil their responsibilities.
Topic 2: Planning a Fieldwork Investigation
Observations allow designers and researchers to understand what activities and routines the target users are engaged with daily and how products are used in what context. Participants are not always aware of the critical factors of their life and where their frustrations come from (Sharp et al., 2019). Observing targeted activities and users enables designers to investigate why people commit to certain activities from objective viewpoints. Such nuances are crucial data for designers to create user-centred products, as they cannot produce a product meeting users’ needs without knowing the context in which it is used. Observing daily routines that users take unintentionally may help designers to realise where inconvenience comes from, which may not always be the area that designers initially focus on. However, there are also limitations to observation methods. One of the limitations is being unable to understand the emotions and the motivation behind participants’ actions (Cooper et al., 2014). Although designers may observe people show their frustration in their faces and body language, it can be their assumptions, and they may have feelings other than frustration. Another limitation is that it is impossible to observe activities happening in a closed or emergent context, such as an evacuating process and activities at home. For example, when designers want to investigate citizens' communications and action patterns when they are escaping from hurricanes, they cannot conduct observations in such life-threatening situations (Demuth et al., 2018). In these cases, online ethnography will be helpful.
While observation allows designers to gather data about users’ actual behaviour and action patterns, interviews give them more profound insights into users’ thoughts, feelings and perceptions of using products and services (Blandford et al., 2015). Interviews enable us to give us to ask follow-up questions to understand the reasons and motivations behind their actions, which we may be unaware of without these interviews. Although we can gain valuable information that helps us develop a deeper understanding of targeted users’ feelings and thoughts, interviews also have some limitations. The story told by the interviewees is subjective, and the pain points they mentioned are not necessarily the cause of the pain they felt. Therefore, interviews are often used with observations that give designers objective information. Another limitation is that interviews are not feasible when participants are too young and cannot talk through their experiences or when target users are not available around them (Sharp et al., 2019). Some people with trauma feel anxious and unwilling to share their experiences. In such cases, we should take alternative approaches to gather information to design a product suitable for these people.
Topic 3: Personas and Scenarios
Personas and scenarios are critical tools for designers to organise the massive and overwhelming data from their research to focus on what particular users need, the critical aspects of products, and the actual goals for particular users. Qualitative data shows different users’ feelings, goals, and motivations related to a product and distract designers from the critical features (Cooper et al., 2014). Creating personas allows designers to pick up the minor detail that will be critical to let users accomplish their goals otherwise dismissed. Persona also adds emotions to such dry data as making a persona is a process of forming the data into a person with unique feelings, purpose and goals (Dam & Siang, 2022). For example, when we researched users' needs at Telstra Creator Space, we collected much meaningful information through interviews and observations. However, we did not know what challenges to focus on as each participant had different opinions, and the stakeholder we interviewed wanted something she wanted to achieve. We also shaped our stereotypes towards the situation and users as well. Analysing data from the viewpoint of creating a persona helped us develop a clear understanding of actual users’ goals and feelings when using the spaces. This process led us to pay attention to nuances in interviewees’ answers and behaviours. “Not enough space” was a keyword we heard in interviews multiple times, but it was not seen much in our observations. Making our persona, we realised that this word meant that tools such as laser printers were unavailable when they wanted to use them or could not find wider space when they were working on bigger pieces. Therefore, we developed a booking technology for spaces and tools to fulfil their needs.
The scenario is a crucial road map, informed by the data collected from fieldwork, for designers to visualise how users can accomplish their goals and purposes using a product. Scenario, together with personas, is the best way for designers to navigate themselves to the best possible solution. Narratives enable designers to imagine personas using their products, which stimulates their creativity and helps them figure out what personas’ goal is in the particular narrative and how their product can assist them in achieving the goal (Cooper et al., 2014). Making a scenario informed by the rich data they collected captures the users’ steps to use a product to fulfil their goals (Costa, 2020). In our fieldwork of design assessment, we created a persona first and drew a scenario where the persona finds it frustrating. It included what the persona would do in this situation, how he/she felt, including their background stories. In designing our application, we often went back to this persona and scenario to analyse if each feature satisfies these personas' needs and to check if we were designing something irrelevant to users’ goals. Scenario and persona were a checkpoint that we engaged with the empathy of the products, and we developed our application towards the user goals.
Topic 4: From Fieldwork to Design
Our team investigated the Telstra Creator Space for Assignment 2. Interviews and observations helped us put ourselves in the shoes of users. It allowed us to realise the different backgrounds each user has and their unique and different opinions on using the space. We learnt the users’ motivations, purpose and beliefs in the area. For example, some people used the space as a group for their engineering club, and others worked on individual projects for their subjects. How they felt about the space also helped us to understand how much stakeholders’ value influences users. The stakeholder emphasised the safety and cleanliness of the area to cultivate positive learning environments in the interview with us, and most interviewees mentioned and appreciated these. This motivated us to build something to enhance this culture even further. We successfully employed users with different backgrounds, including domestic/international students, staff and a stakeholder, which gave us various possible ideas to improve this space.
Translating users’ words to actual needs was the hardest part. We struggled with this part as we may not have conducted enough observations, particularly for the areas where interviewees raised their concerns and frustrations. Some information about students’ behaviour about using tools was missing. We could also have conducted observations and interviews in more structured ways. I learnt that planning investigation was key to success. We could have observed particular users and then asked them follow-up questions about their feelings and motivations behind their behaviour (Kvale, 2009).
Using information from observation and interviews, we discussed finding the sweet spot to address users’ concerns and pain points. We were able to concentrate on user needs extracted from our investigation by creating two different personas with special needs assembled by our data. We imagined how this person would behave and his motivation to use our product. Since what the stakeholder wanted to achieve in future did not completely match current users’ needs found in our investigation, we developed a mobile application including a couple of features that help users achieve their goals and address the stakeholders’ goals. We managed to create a product that supports users’ goals with the help of scenarios and persona informed by our data.
References
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