MYP Design User Centred Design Methods Notes

A Questionnaire Tells You What People Say

1. A questionnaire is fast, reaches 100 people in a lunchtime and gives you numbers you can chart, which is why almost every MYP project starts with one.
2. What it cannot do is show you the thing the user never mentions, because habits are invisible to the person who has them.
3. Ask somebody how often they refill a water bottle and they guess; follow them for a day and you count it.
4. People also answer to look reasonable, so a survey about recycling gets a much greener answer than a bin audit does.
5. User centred design is the habit of putting the real user into every stage of the design cycle rather than checking with them once at the start.

Shadowing: Watch the Task in the Real Place

1. Shadowing means following one user through the whole real task, in the real room, saying as little as possible.
2. Take timings for each step, count how many times they put something down, and photograph the workspace before they tidy it.
3. Hunt for workarounds, the tape wrapped round a handle, the chair wedging a door, the label written in marker pen, because each one is a user fixing a design fault for you.
4. Note what gets done with the non-dominant hand, since one handed moments tell you where a product must be stable on its own.
5. Save your questions for the end, because asking mid-task changes the task.
6. Always get permission before photographing a person or a workplace, and keep faces out of your design folder unless they have agreed.

Empathy Mapping Sorts What You Saw From What You Guessed

1. An empathy map is a large sheet split into boxes that you fill with sticky notes from one user's session.
2. Says and Does hold things you directly observed, and they are evidence you can point at.
3. Thinks and Feels hold your interpretation, so mark them differently, because mixing evidence with guesswork is how projects go wrong.
4. The useful moments are the contradictions, like a user who says the old kettle is fine while repeatedly filling it at the sink because it is too heavy full.
5. What it produces that a questionnaire cannot is a picture of one person's experience with the tensions still visible rather than averaged away.

Personas Give You Someone to Argue With

1. A persona squashes everything you learned from several real users into one written profile of a believable individual.
2. It exists so that design arguments become specific: the question stops being whether the lid is easy enough and becomes whether Priya could open it holding a toddler.
3. Build two or three, and mark one as the primary persona, the person who must be satisfied even if a compromise annoys the others.
4. A persona that is invented from imagination is worse than none, because it makes a guess feel like a finding.
5. Bring them back out during Developing ideas and again during Evaluating, since a persona left on page three of the folder has done no work.

Making a persona that is not a cartoon

1. Give a name, an age, a job or year group, and the situation the product lands in, such as a shared kitchen with no counter space.
2. Write one goal, two frustrations and one real quote you actually heard during shadowing.
3. Add the constraints that will drive decisions: budget, hand strength, time available, whether they wear gloves.
4. Leave out favourite colours and holiday destinations, because detail that never changes a decision is decoration.

Journey Mapping Finds the Step That Actually Breaks

1. A journey map lays the whole experience along a timeline, from before the product is picked up to after it is put away.
2. Under each stage you write the action, what the user touches, and how they feel, usually plotted as a rising and falling line.
3. The low point is rarely where you expected, and a school water bottle project often finds the pain is a four minute refill queue at break, not the drinking at all.
4. Include cleaning, storing and repairing, because those stages get skipped in design and decide whether a product survives a term.
5. What it produces that a questionnaire cannot is the order of events, which is what tells you the fault sits one step earlier than the complaint.

Co-Design and Iterative Testing Keep the User in the Room

1. Co-design moves the user from someone who reacts to your ideas into someone who makes ideas alongside you.
2. Practical versions are cheap: sketch on the same sheet, sort feature cards into must have and nice to have, or push modelling clay and cardboard around until the shape is right.
3. Treat a user's proposed solution as a clue to a need, because somebody asking for a bigger handle may really be telling you the product is too heavy.
4. Iterative testing means testing rough and testing often, so a card and foam mock-up goes in front of users days before anything is 3D printed.
5. Five users are usually enough per round to expose most of the obvious problems, and it is better to run three rounds of five than one round of fifteen.
6. Change one thing between rounds, otherwise you cannot tell which change fixed the problem and which one caused the new one.