The ability to “play with the data” is a critical capability in analysis. We utilize this technique in many situations: searching for patterns or trends in our observations; or as another preparatory stage for further analysis. Sorting data in some way – alphabetic, chronological, complexity or numerical – is a form of manipulation.

(This article is the third part in the Deconstructing Analysis Techniques series.)

Manipulating data is that process of re-sorting, rearranging and otherwise moving your research data, without fundamentally changing it. This is used both as a preparatory technique – i.e. as a precursor to some other activity – or as a means of exploring the data as an analytic tool in its own right.

One of the key characteristics of a manipulation technique versus related techniques like transformation is that the underlying data remains unchanged. The main thing we’re doing is changing the relationship – logical or physical – that one piece of data has with another.

Reorganizing the data helps us to identify patterns that may otherwise not be apparent. In fact, it is almost certain that most patterns won’t be visible at first glance.

Let’s start by taking a more detailed look at some of the processes that contribute to the manipulation of data.

Re-sorting is literally a technique aimed at changing the order of the data. Re-sorting is most often carried out on numerical or quantitative data, but can just as easily be applied to text content. There are a few common types of sorting – numerical, alphabetical, chronological; as well as some that are much less common. For example, a list of responses to a survey question asking for a rating of a service might be sorted based on the severity and tone (positive or negative) of the review.

Sorting data helps to isolate significant individual values – the highest or lowest, most-frequent or least-frequent, first or last; and can also be a way of highlighting the shape of the data (more on this later).

Re-arranging is an activity that typically involves the physical or digital repositioning of a data element so that it sits in closer proximity to another. This might be to organize photographs into a narrative; or to juxtapose contrasting ideas for discussion.

Rearranging ideas through the manipulation of Post-its. Photo courtesy of Todd Warfel.

Much of the rearranging we do is exploratory, although at times it will be more directed. In these cases we might be trying to present a new configuration for our data – like rearranging furniture – to better support some activity.

Some of this manipulation will be more purposeful. We might be seeking to categorize a collection of photographs by grouping them into similar piles; or draw out common themes in user interviews. Recall, for example, in our article on Deconstruction we talked about breaking out key phrases or ideas into separate data points (on index cards, post-it notes etc).

What are we trying to achieve, though, with all this moving about?

Patterns

I’ve written previously on the important role pattens play in analysis; and the different types of patterns one might seek to find and identify in research data. The patterns we seek include:

• Trends: the gradual, general progression of data up or down;
• Repetitions: a series of values that repeat themselves;
• Cycles: a regularly recurring series of data;
• Feedback systems: a cycle that gets progressively bigger or smaller because of some influence;
• Clusters: a concentration of data or objects in one small area;
• Pathways: a sequential pattern of data;
• Gaps: an area devoid of observations;
• Exponential growth: rapidly increasing rate of growth;
• Diminishing returns: there is a decreasing rate of growth;
• Long tail: a pattern that rises steeply at the start, falls sharply, and then levels off over a large range of values.

Immersion

Many design researchers and design practitioners talk about the need to immerse themselves in the data before they can make any kind of sense of it. Manipulating the data is a way of gaining that immersion – that familiarity – through direct engagement.

Designers will undertake this process in a number of ways, depending on the format in which data has been stored. One of the most popular forms of manipulation is to write out key concepts, observations, and ideas onto Post-It notes and stick these to a wall.

The design team them actively moves the physical Post-It notes around, rearranging and grouping concepts and observations to help trigger creative ideas. This technique may be used in both the analysis and design processes to assist the design team, and there isn’t a write or wrong time at which it can be undertaken. This type of exploratory analysis can be powerful, and is a key tool in the card sorting analysis arsenal.

If running the card sort was the fun part, analysis is the painful part, at least until you get going. Exploratory analysis is like playing in the data – looking for connections that make you think “hey, that’s interesting”, or that show patterns of behaviour. – Donna Spencer, Card Sorting

Donna’s quote highlights two important characteristics of this analysis technique: firstly, that it can help uncover and highlight key insights in the design research data; and secondly, that sometimes starting is the hardest part.

Where Do I Begin?

Design research – any research activity, really – can result in a body of data that simply feels overwhelming. Thousands of sticky notes containing observations or notes, covering the walls of a ‘war room’. Perhaps it’s thousands of survey responses, or dozens of interview transcripts. It may be hundreds of photographs taken of users in context; or hours of video of a user testing study.

Sometimes this richness of available data works against us, making it difficult to understand where we should begin. Like it’s counter-part in analysis – Deconstruction – the techniques of Manipulation are easy to undertake, and require little or no preparation.

Perhaps more importantly, Manipulation encourages exploration. It works well as an unstructured activity and therefore works well as an entry point into those vast collections of messy data points we’re so often faced with early in the analysis. If you’re not sure where to begin, begin with manipulation – the more tangible and tactile the better.

Uses of Manipulation

Despite the simplicity of manipulation as a technique, it delivers the heart of some very powerful analytic methods. For example, affinity diagramming is requires little more than manipulation (and perhaps deconstruction as a preparatory technique) to produce some real insights.

In many respects, the method of creating a mental model introduced by Indi Young in her book of the same name is another example of manipulating data with intent. Throughout the method data is manipulated – usually physically – through the use of sticky notes or index cards. Ideas are grouped and compared, collated or isolated, by physically repositioning and rearranging the physical object.

Manipulation can also be used to answer specific research questions. We can sort our data chronologically to find the first occurrence of an event. We can sort the data numerically to identify the highest or lowest values, or to identify the median figure (the middle observation) in a series of observations.

Perhaps we’ve already gone through an exercise of aggregating data points and tallying up the number of occurrences of each. We can now manipulate the data and sort in either ascending or descending order to identify the most common or least common responses. This combination of techniques – aggregation and manipulation – provides for an unsophisticated, but still useful ‘method’.

And that, of course, is one of the key things about each of the analysis techniques discussed in this series: whilst each is useful on its own, their real power comes from the ways in which they are combined to form the sophisticated and rich methods we tend to encounter in books.

Challenges

One of the greatest challenges we face when we start to play with our research data is a tendency to settle on the first arrangement; the first patterns; the first grouping. We begin with such a chaotic mess, that first glimpse of something that presents us with a clear view – some sense of real meaning – can be quite powerful. We resist the step of re-shuffling and messing it up again, and may therefore miss the opportunity to see a second, third or fourth pattern.

Another major challenge – which we’ve mentioned above – is that the volume of data can be quite daunting. As much as it is a good step to just get started, some sense of how data elements can be grouped or arranged before you begin is important; but it shouldn’t be an obstacle.

And, of course, we must be in a position to easily manipulate the data we’ve collected. This means the format and medium in which our data is recorded is critical. Storing data digitally is not necessarily advantageous or preferable: many designers will attest to the positive effects that can come from physically interacting with the data.

Summary

Manipulation can therefore be seen as one of many low level analysis techniques with which we work every day. We’ve all encountered it in one form or another, and probably spent little time considering it. And yet it is one of the major workhorses of any analysis effort, and one which we should understand.

Over the last years I have noticed that many books and articles talk about the usefulness (or not) of personas, delving a little into the actual production and design of the persona as well as defending it’s usage. Very few explicitly define some of the activities that occur within the design research phase. It was Jared Spool that mentioned the real value of personas being the actual process of engaging with users and developing empathy towards their circumstances and experience interacting with a product.1 The following article grew out of a conversation with Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes (author of “Modular Web Design“) when I offered to contribute what I called a “Mood Map” to the Unify Documentation System. Let’s start.

Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums.

While people who didn’t go on the vacation can look through the album and think, “Boy, that must’ve been fun,” they’ll never get the full experience of what the actual vacation experience was. The album is just a remnant.
JM Spool, Personas are NOT a Document

The purpose of a Mood Map is to document and map the emotional states of a user [over time] so that it can guide the creation and communication of personas to stakeholders whilst also informing the design process itself. I’m not one for UX deliverables for their own sake, but this is one that carries a lot of weight with clients and also goes a ways towards offering ‘traceability’ for your personas.

This article will begin with a brief overview of design research, an overview of Mood Maps, when to use them, as well as when not. I will not address interpretive, phenomenological, or constructivist paradigms and how those may shape our views on design research or the particular tactics used to uncover user emotive states.

Design Ethnography

Design Ethnography is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target market in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand in the context of a complex dynamic ecosystem that borders on chaos. In addition, ethnographic research seeks to reveal insights into how the target market shares information about their problem space and potential solutions with their immediate social cohort.

Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive. One primary difference between ethnography and other methods of user research is that ethnography assumes that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons they give for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, before we can assign to their actions and behaviors interpretations drawn from our own experiences.

Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, in User Experience – a Research Agenda state that “It has become obvious that the design for user experience needs to aim to satisfy human needs beyond the merely instrumental, and to focus on how to create positive experiences rather than just prevent usability problems.”2 In other words, the aim of experience design is not only to serve our practical needs and to help us reach practical goals, but also to give meaning and to contribute to the quality of our life.3

Besides taking into account the human needs, we must consider the affective and emotional aspects of the interaction, and the full nature of experience must be understood to capture the essence of user experience before we can undertake the task of designing a better, more emotionally positive experience.4

Findings from a design ethnography project will influence both near-term problem setting and experience design activities, as well as longer-term dynamic mediated social-systems development. During such study I seek to uncover pertinent insights about the target market’s experience enframing their goals, objectives, and perspectives as it directly relates to the client’s brand; and the role that these activities play with regards to interactions with their environment including context, family, friends, group, community and society.

Design Research & Mood Maps

By Design Research, I specifically mean in-situ interviews and observation sessions which are conducted to probe deeply into the lives, habits, and emotions of target consumers as it relates to a specific product or service. A cross-section of participants of a robust enough sample size must take part in the various activities to gain deeper understanding and to move beyond ‘design-by-anecdote;’ to elicit key joy and pain points that occur whilst these activities take place in context experiencing the brand in solving real life problems.

While there are a number of tactical activities a design researcher can engage in including interviews, journals, usability testing, focus groups, and task analysis (‘Doc’ Baty’s article in UX Matters is excellent: “User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models“) – one that is particularly good at gaining insight into the emotive aspects of a user’s experience is the Mood Map. It is important to remember that Mood Maps are an intermediate deliverable meant to provide meaningful insight for the creation of personas, not a final artifact. You may also choose to never show these to key stakeholders, but only include them in the appendix of a findings document after the research phase is done.

Another important point is that Mood Maps are best used for larger, more complicated user engagements or scenarios, not small directed tasks – logging into an application would not be an appropriate use of Mood Maps.

Phases and Emotions

The diagram above describes the emotional ups and downs identified by study participants as part of the design exercise conducted during in-home visits with participants. Note that the location of the study is less relevant than the importance of observing the participants in the most likely context in which they will engage in their experience with the brand’s product or service. During the exercise, participants are asked to name each of the phases they went through from framing their problem through exploration and finally (hopefully) problem solving, and to then assign a corresponding emotion to each phase.

The diagram represents an average of participant responses. The exercise tends to uncover some important variations based on a number of factors, including each participant’s individual personality, profile, as well as emotional relationship with the brand – or a competitor’s. These variations are described in the “participants’ emotions” section for each phase which the researcher is encouraged to heavily document, photograph, and take notes.

Cycle of Exploration

Exploration is not a linear state, but rather a cycle of activities such as “imagine,” “research,” or “try-on,” each with a particular cognitive posture (I encourage you to identify more, for instance “ask,” “validation seeking,” as potential social postures a user could engage in).

It is important to reflect upon each of the phases of the user engagement and attempt to identify the dominant activity. During a study of this type people instinctively begin to combat the uncertainty of indecision by considering the circumstances of their goal and limiting their options based on various contextual constraints – the term ‘satisficing‘ is used to describe this. If it is possible to have the participants verbalize their thought process, it will aid in providing you with a richer understanding of their emotional reaction to a particular phase. These verbalizations should be captured and presented with Mood Maps made for each participant, some of which may end up in the personas as guiding insights for design consideration.

In presenting the findings, it is important to tell a complete narrative based on an aggregation of the findings before delving into particular anecdotes about any specific participant. An aggregate view uncovers both the joyous as well as the frustrating aspects of the interactions, which may highlight unknown, or at the very least, un-discovered, weaknesses in the user experience which can be marked for further exploration.

Addendum

By way of my friend ‘Doc’ Baty, I stumbled upon a blog post by Bruce Timkin which shows another way to visualize the aggregated Mood Maps: an Experience Wheel, like the one he found at Lego. Although it is unclear what research, activities, or methods are used to arrive at the Experience Wheel it’s still an interesting way to visualize the total user experience in phases.

Resources

1. Chapman, J. Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy. Earthscan Ltd, UK, 2005.

2. Hassenzahl, M. and Tractinsky, N.. User Experience – a Research Agenda”. Behaviour and Information Technology 25, 2, 91-97, (2006).

3. Hassenzahl, M. and Roto, V. Being and doing: A perspective on User Experience and its measurement. Interfaces, 72, 10-12, (2007).

4. Desmet, P.M.A. Designing Emotions (PhD dissertation) Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2002.

• Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
  By Mike Kuniavsky
• Design Research: Methods and Perspectives
  by Brenda Laurel (Editor), Peter Lunenfeld (Preface)
• Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research (Ethnographer’s Toolkit , Vol 1)
  by Margaret Diane LeCompte
• LEGO’s Building Block For Good Experiences
  post by Bruce Temkin

Over the last 20 years a company called BrainStore has created many brilliant ideas for major companies around the world. To make this happen they developed a very succesful process called Industrial Idea Production, focusing on the co-creation of ideas. I want to take you into their proces and show some of the secrets to success.

BrainStore, based in Switzerland, has a quite special product – it sells ideas. Not design, or advertising, or brands. Just ideas. Big amounts of them. You can buy 10, 20, 30, 90 ideas for any possible question. Starting from a name (one day work) through management issues till development of new principles of folding a rooftop for a new car or even developing a new chemical formula (1-2 months). Their USP can be summarized as “A big set of ideas developed by a special mix of participants in a very quick time”.

The BrainStore process can be divided into three steps: preparation, creative workshop and selection.

1. Preparation

As soon as a contract has been signed, the project manager summarizes the goal of the project in one simple question. This question is extremely important because it will be leading for the entire project. It should be clear, catchy and inspiring for every participant (BrainStore’s employees, participants of the workshop and the client). The project manager together with a client sets two to five criteria which every idea should fulfil.

As an example let’s develop a fictional project. Let’s say: a coffee-seling company wants to develop a new cup. The main question could be “How can we innovate a coffee cup?”… but this would be to open. “What innovative features will a coffee cup have in 2020?” would be a better question, liberating your imagination much more effective.

Set of criteria could include:

1. Will this cup impress our target audience?
2. Could this cup be produced during the next 3 moths?
   
3. Will production costs (incl. R&D part) be less than EUR 10 per cup?

And let’s say, we want to have 20 ideas after this project.

After initiation, two new professionals begin their work: a producer and a team manager. The producer devides the topic into sub-topics where the quantity of sub-topics depends on the complexity. Then he prepares a list of triggers. Topics, triggers and creative techniques are combined to form an unusual question that is intended to open mind and contributes to finding new ways of solving a problem.

• Topic = features of a coffee cup;
• Subtopics = bottom, handle, material, electronic features, temperature, etc.;
• Triggers = types of coffee, other drinks, George Clooney, traditions of drinking, Facebook, speed, etc.;
• Creative techniques = writing race, painting, Play-Doh, combining, etc.;
• Question for a co-creation workshop = In groups of two, form out of Play-Doh;
  
• all the features that a coffee cup will never have.

Concurrently, a team manager determines a list of participants for a co-creation workshop that consists of five groups:

• Client employees: they know the topic deeply;
• Target group representatives: they have spoken and unspoken wishes that the client is going to fulfil;
• Lateral thinkers: they look at the topic from unusual point of view;
• Teenagers and students: they often don’t have a clue about the topic – and therefore are open-minded. They are bold, fresh and don’t know idea killing phrases;
• Experts: they will check the strongest ideas against set criteria, 1 expert per 1 criterion.

Lateral thinkers: They don’t have anything to do with the topic of the project directly. But when looking more generically, some parts of their job or life are closely related to the topic. Great example: For developing a foldable rooftop for a car, BrainStore invited an origami master.

Some additional preparations may be done: interviews of customers, clients or experts, internet research of existing ideas, market research on special markets like Japan, Brasilia, etc.

BrainStorm is full of ideas

2. Creative workshop

First part of the workshop is dedicated to Creating of Content. This is a brainstorm, but a quite unusual one. It is very fast, loud and full of movement. And it is extremely mixed. All participants run trough a facility, answering questions, painting stuff, speaking with random partners… there is loud music everywhere. Every silly idea is allowed. It looks quite chaotic but is in fact well orchestrated. Note now: Every single piece of information is saved in a database: there are many people in the background typing and taking pictures of everything what comes out in a workshop.

Imagine a CEO, CFO and a junior sales manager of our coffee company cutting magazines together with a 40 year old mom, some students, an office guy, a travel manager and an Italian cook with some loud MTV music on background. After three minutes they will run trough the yard competing who writes ideas faster. After seven minutes they will draw pictures using gouache. After this stage, about 1000 “raw ideas” are expected to be produced.

Second part: Elaboration. All “raw ideas” from the first part are presented in different ways now. And it means literally – every single, even stupid thought is exhibited many times. Cloud diagrams, freshly printed “books”, every idea printed on a separate piece of paper, etc. The purpose of it is to hold the brain awake, because this part of a workshop is quiet, unhurried and serious. Participants, inspired by raw ideas from the first part, now start developing ideas related to the main question.

The facility is reorganized. There are a “library”, “park”, “cinema”, “bath”, etc. People move slowly from one place to another, searching through all the ideas from the first part and relating their ideas only to the main question: “What innovative features will a coffee cup have in 2020?”  (or to a sub-question, like “What innovative electronic features will a coffe cup have in 2020?”, “What coolness features will the coffeecups have in 2020?” or “What are green features of a coffee cup in 2020?” )
After this stage, there will be about 200 ideas ready.

3. Selection

The selection happens on two levels. On the first, every co-creation participant selects three to five favorites of all developed ideas. On the second, experts check pre-selected ideas against criteria set at the very beginning of the project.

After this part there are about 30 ideas selected.

Then winning ideas are elaborated in compliance with comments the experts have given and visualized in a comparative way, so that the essence of ideas can be understood within seconds but the picture itself has no impact on perception of an idea. Like this, the ideas are presented to the client for a next selection. Afterwards ideas are made into detailed concepts.

And so the client ends up with a selection of (hopefully) great concepts.

Top image by: Thomas Claveirole