Five Human-Centred Design Methods to Use in Your Projects When You Are in Isolation
By: Martin Tomitsch
Tags: User Experience Design, Design Education, Design Thinking, Human Centred Design, Remote Design Research

Like other design educators around the world, we had to very quickly transition all our units to an online mode in an effort to reduce the spread of Covid-19.

Most of our courses in the University of Sydney’s Design Discipline involve human-centred design aspects, which are challenging to replicate in a world where we are forced to avoid contact with others. This turned out to be one of our greatest challenges, in particular in our design studios which see groups of students working closely together and involving their target users, industry clients and other stakeholders along the way.

There are some human-centred design methods, like interviews, that are relatively easy to carry out without being physically co-located, e.g. using Zoom, Google Meet or other video conferencing tools. In fact, this may open up new opportunities for being creative about choosing your project focus and selecting study participants — as we are no longer limited by the constraints of geographical distance. Other methods, like questionnaires, are not necessarily even affected as they are already carried out online. But what if your design project was meant to involve observing people within an urban space, or co-designing and testing physical prototypes with end users?

With these questions in mind, we reviewed 60 design methods included in our handbook Design, Think, Make, Break, Repeat, which we use as a teaching resource here at the University of Sydney. This article profiles five methods that you might not immediately think of when teaching human-centred design, or when completing a human-centred design project. The article discusses how these methods can be used across some of the phases and activities common in human-centred design: problem-framing, ideation, prototyping and testing, and communication; with each of the methods corresponding to one of those phases.

With the generous support of our publisher, BIS Publishers, we have also included links to the relevant pages from our handbook to share and be used by the wider community. Design educators can download and share these pages with their students to scaffold their learning. An overview of all 60 methods along with free templates, resources and slides are also available via the handbook’s companion website.

Framing Problems Through Direct Experience Storyboards

Direct experience storyboards combine the advantages of systematic observation, direct experience, documentation and storytelling. They are particularly useful in contextually sensitive situations. The method is typically used for ideation and testing, but can also help with identifying and framing problems by looking at a situation from the user’s perspective.

The method in its original form involves members of the design team visiting the site or environment that is relevant to their design brief to take contextual notes about users and their behaviour — e.g. observing visitors in a museum. The team subsequently generates a list of typical activities that occur in the environment. Each team member then is assigned a role, playing out the various activities identified. This step is documented through photos, which are put together in chronological order and annotated to create a photo storyboard.

Carrying out the method in isolation requires some creative adjustments. If your design project allows you to carry out observations around your home — great! If not, you need to try and find alternative material online in place of visiting the actual site, e.g. you could watch video clips of museum visits on YouTube; many museums, such as the Louvre in Paris, now also offer free virtual tours.

After identifying typical activities, your design team members each play through the activities in their home, documenting via selfies or asking a household member to assist with taking photographs. You can then use a collaborative online platform like Google Docs or Miro (which has a free account option) to upload the photos, bringing them into synchronological order and annotating them to create storyboards. The final step is to review and discuss the storyboards with your team members (through a video conference session), and to identify different problem frames that might have emerged from acting out and annotating the activities.

Direct experience storyboards method and exercise description. Click here to download a PDF version.

Doing Research Through Online Ethnography

Online ethnography translates the principles of traditional ethnographic studies to the study of people and their interactions online. It can replace other research methods, for example when it is not possible to directly visit locations. Even if you are able to visit the location relevant to your project brief, a pandemic-driven lock-down changes people’s behaviour, which would severely skew your data. For example, if your research involves studying check-in kiosks at airports, there is limited value in doing field observations during a global pandemic.

When doing online ethnography, you can either identify and focus on one platform or include data from multiple platforms. The first step is to identify which platforms your user group interacts with. For example, if the design project focuses on airline travel experience, relevant platforms might include TripAdvisor and Twitter.

The next step is to identify specific criteria for what data to include. For example, you might decide to focus on comments posted about a particular airline, or include all comments made during a particular time period. Using the online ethnography template, record your notes as you read the relevant entries posted on the online platform(s). The notes can then be used and further analysed (e.g. in the form of an affinity diagram) like any other research data in your project.

Online ethnography method and exercise description. Click here to download the PDF version.

Ideating Collaboratively Online With Brainwriting

There is much evidence suggesting that collaboration spurs creativity. Creative group brainstorming sessions can be replicated in remote working situations using online tools such as Google Jamboard along with a video conference channel. However, the flow of these sessions is affected by the limitation of video chat tools, which don’t quite match the dynamic of a group of people sitting around a shared table.

The brainwriting ideation method is a good alternative to other ideation methods in a self-isolation situation, as it involves team members ideating individually before coming together as a group to discuss and evaluate the generated ideas. It’s also a powerful method as it can lead to up to 108 ideas in 30 minutes. The method involves six team members, each coming up with three ideas in five-minute cycles.

Brainwriting 6–3–5 method and exercise description. Click here to download the PDF version.

Usually, the method is carried out using print-outs of the brainwriting template — six printouts for a team of six people — but the method can also be carried out with smaller teams. Every team member starts with a blank page and comes up with three ideas; after the first five-minute cycle, everyone passes on their page in a clockwise rotation. In the second round, each team member records three new ideas that build on the ideas developed by their peer in the previous round. This is repeated until everyone has contributed to each of the pages.

Brainwriting with eight team members, each generating eight ideas over six rounds. (Miro board produced in the Biodesign Studio led by Phil Gough.)

In a remote situation, team members can use an online platform like Google Docs (you can copy this pre-populated Google Docs template for your own project) combined with a video, audio or text chat. One of the team members should be appointed as a moderator and timekeeper. Upon completing the idea generation phase, it might be useful to move to another tool like Miro or Google Jamboard, transferring potential ideas from the brainwriting sheets for further discussing, evaluating and combining ideas. If your team is experienced in working with collaborative online platforms, the brainwriting method can also be completed entirely in Miro.

Testing Prototypes With Persona-Based Walkthroughs

Testing prototypes with intended users is a critical part of the design process, ensuring that proposed designs are fit for purpose, and that they meet user needs. It can also help to identify any usability problems early, creating an opportunity to address them easily. Importantly, it also works to create wider user engagement — when your users feel invested in your design, they are more likely to support it. However, testing prototypes in a scenario such as Covid-19 where there is no face-to-face contact and no physical interaction with a tangible artefact or prototype can be challenging.

Persona-based walkthroughs can offer an alternative approach for testing your prototypes while working remotely. The method employs personas, which are fictional characters created to represent typical users, customers or other stakeholders, visualising rich and valuable insights generated by research methods such as interviews and observation. Each persona communicates the goals, motivations, attitudes, behaviours and frustrations of a particular user-group, allowing us to consider and engage more deeply with user needs during the design process.

Persona-based walkthroughs bring personas to life, transforming them from static, passive characters into roles that are much more active and dynamic. In a walkthrough, the persona is enacted and different scenarios are “walked” through the eyes (or perspective) of the user. In a face-to-face situation, this method usually involves working with a partner. One person acts as the persona and performs a walkthrough of the prototype being tested. The other person takes on the role of the evaluator, observing and taking notes.

With team members being distributed remotely, the walkthrough can be video-recorded to capture the team member acting out the scenarios. The evaluator can then respond to the video directly, noting down observations and sharing them via online platforms such as Miro. The video can also be shared across larger design teams, creating opportunities for increased evaluation, feedback and improved sense-checking of prototypes.

Persona-based walkthrough method and exercise description. Click here to download the PDF version.

Using Research Visualisations For Communicating Your Project Findings and Progress

Research visualisations are used to capture the most relevant results of a research process and to prominently display them in a visual manner. Communicating not only results of the research process but of all steps in a design process becomes even more important when working remotely — whether it’s to communicate with your team members or with your project supervisor. The research visualisation method can be adapted to communicate key themes in a visual and easily digestible way. At its core is the idea of finding a visual metaphor (or a combination of metaphors) to use as a basis for the visualisation. For example, this could be in the form of a timeline (from morning to night, or Monday to Friday), or a drawing of a physical space, such as a map or floor plan.

The visualisation is then created by sketching out the elements of the story you want to communicate, starting with the most important elements. Each element consists of a catchy title and a short summary, supported by a visual figure (e.g. a diagram, icon, sketch or image). The most important information in your visualisation should use the most dominant visual figure. You can also add additional information, such as user quotes to support the information conveyed in your visualisation.

Research visualisation documenting the user research about a museum visitor experience. (Image by Francesca Serpelloni, Alex Elton-Pym, Mackenzie Etherington, Matt Fehlberg)

Research visualisations often take the form of a poster that can be hung on the wall as a point of reference. When working remotely, it may be more effective to create the visualisations in a slide deck format. The visualisation can span one or multiple slides. That way it can easily be shared in digital form and viewed on a screen without having to print it.

We use a “visual reports” format in many of our design classes for project submissions, which take a hybrid form of project reports and research visualisations. Visual reports shift the focus from writing long texts to prioritising key themes and points in a visual manner. They have the advantage that they can be used for communicating within teams and presenting work to your client or supervisor, as well as being able to be shared electronically as they can be read and understood without someone having to explain them.

Research visualisation method and exercise description. Click here to download the PDF version.

Final words

We know that each design project is unique and requires a particular approach. None of the methods presented here might be perfect for your situation and the design project you are working on. But we hope that they might inspire you to think differently about how you could employ human-centred design methods in your projects while Covid-19 forces us to stay at and work from home. If you have any other ideas or thoughts you’d like to share, we would love to hear from you. You can email us at contact@designthinkmakebreakrepeat.com.

Other useful resources for teaching, studying and doing design remotely:

Acknowledgements

Thank you to: BIS Publishers for allowing us to share the original content from our handbook “Design, Think, Make, Break, Repeat” for the methods included in this article; Nina Juhl from INCUBATE for introducing me to Google Jamboard; and all the “Design, Think, Make, Break, Repeat” authors and contributors behind the methods included in this article.