anne fairbrother
Experience Design / InnovationArchive for INNOVATE
bodystorming
What:
Bodystorming is a participatory method for demonstrating or developing ideas in a physical setting. Team members explore ideas and interactions physically, often using props such as maps or photos to give a sense of place.
Why:
Bodystorming goes beyond brainstorming by giving an idea a physical form and acting it out in different contexts. The process is designed to uncover how the relationships between people, locations and things affect ideas in ways that written scenarios cannot. It enables rapid iteration of ideas and relationships through a dynamic process of acting and evaluating. The process reveals how people interact with services, products and each other on a physical, emotional and intuitive level.
When:
Bodystorming is a method to help build and test ideas, so it is best carried out early in a project lifecycle. It works best after research has been carried out to understand better the issues surrounding a problem or specific needs of service users.
It can be used with clients as a way of making touch points in a service more tangible or revealing assumptions about ideas, users and technologies.
Example:
We used bodystorming to test alternative narrative journeys for the BBC Coast audio walks. Early story ideas were tried out and routes plotted on large scale maps.
Bodystorming gave us the opportunity to interact with each other whilst engaging with the story in its journey context. The method helped highlight interaction challenges as well as logistical issues which could be solved before taking working prototypes out on location.
Storyboarding
What
Storyboarding is a narrative technique or arranging a series of illustrations in sequence in order to pre-visualize a motion graphic or human product interaction.
They are normally presented as a series of frames, which show an event like a user journey or interaction. The form varies from the very sketchy to very detailed depending on whether they are used to report on existing situations, present new ideas or design concepts for discussion.
Why
Storyboards help to visualize context and time. They are increasingly being used in interaction and service design to communicate a users actions as well as the context – place, situation, social setting in which a product or service is used.
Storyboards are often used with other design tools such as role-playing, quick and dirty modelling sketching, and use-scenarios.
When
Soryboarding can be used at various points in the design cycle. To help shape early ideas, to explore implications of a design decision, to illustrate the context of a proposed solution.
Photo Storyboarding is a quick and collaborative technique for building storyboards in which teams act out a narrative using simple props. The props may be white card cut outs to represent a product. Digital photos of the action are quickly printed and used to form the storyboard. These images can be sketched over, cropped and props annotated.
Getting service users or clients to join in acting out the story will bring new insight and understanding.
In physically making a storyboard teams are confronted with a diverse range of questions and design implications, which may otherwise be post-poned with more abstract considerations.
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scenario planning
Scenario Planning is a strategic planning method which can be used to make flexible long term plans. Scenarios are a set of alternative descriptions of the future which show how each possible future was shaped by events and driving forces.
Decision makers can use scenarios to think about the aspects of the future that most concern them. Designers can use scenarios to stimulate and test ideas about new products and services.
In a world of increasingly complexity and rapid change there is rarely a simple answer.
Scenario planning delivers a set of scenarios that address the same critical questions but describe a different way in which aspects of the future may play out.
Scenarios are aids to thinking. They are not predictions about the future.
Not do they set out future implications for an organisation. They bring to life potential futures and help people understand the implications and consider different responses.
They also provide organisations with a common language for talking about current events and future uncertainty.
Mocumentary
A Mocumentary is a fictional but documentary style video interview with an imagined user persona. Using script writers and actors can really help bring a persona to life and enable clients or designers to understand users lives or the impact of news services on a very personal level.
Why? It is a useful tool to use when it is not possible to interview or film the real lives of actual users. This could be because of access issues, you want to imagine an extreme-use case scenario or a user in a future setting.
For our ‘Digital Britain’ scenario planning project in the BBC, we created documentary style video interviews and fictional reports written by key characters living in the future, who reflected on life in 2014 and key events of the decade.
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systems thinking
Systems maps help to explain the key components of a system and their relationships. User or trends research will generate large amounts of data. Systems thinking is a tool to help explore the relative importance and relationships between different factors.
Creating a systems map will help to identify patterns as well as cause and effect. They are useful as a shared thinking tool and can help articulate alternative points of view about complex issues.
How: Identify the key issue that you want at the centre of your system - the main story that emerges from research you have carried out. Create a list of all the factors that could have an effect on this core issue.
Post-It notes, hexagons and movable arrows can be used to turn these factors into a dynamic map. As your arguments evolves and changes shape take photographs to document the thinking process.
Issues: Systems thinking requires analytical thinkers who have been immersed in the research process and can apply thinking based on research findings not on presumptions.
I used this process with teams in a series of BBC Interactive TV futures workshops. Teams were able identify forces and trends that would impact the sector and the complex dynamics between them.
User-Personas
Personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a website or product. They are created so that these characteristics can be taken into account when creating scenarios for designing a site or product.
How: The use of ethnographic research will help create more realistic archetypes. By feeding in real data, from observation, diary studies, probes, interviews or focus groups design teams to avoid generating stereotypical users that may bear no relation to the actual user’s reality.
User personas should consider many aspects of person’s daily life beyond demographics - lifestyle, media habits, attitudes, desires, fears…
The emphasis will depend on the nature of the product or services being designed and it’s context of use. Below are a number of design tools that can be used for bringing the findings of ethnographic research to life and creating rich personas.
Daily media use - clock: understanding the circumstances in which people consume media can reveal unanticipated issues or new opportunities.
This illustration shows patterns the patterns of media consumption, by a 9 year old over a 24 hour period. A series of cards were produced with annotations on the back describing what media was being consumed, when, where and with whom.
Home media - floor plan: audiences will have different needs and attention levels depending on whether they are alone or with family and friends, and what other activities they may be engaged in.
This floor plan of a personas home shows what devices each family member owned and where different types of content are likely to be consumed.
Bag contents: personal objects and their stories mat reveal differences in attitudes - unusual perceptions or interests.
Asking people to show and describe the things they carry with them - and to explain why they are important can provide valuable insight. Evidence can be documented through video interviews or by annotating photos.
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Participatory design
Participatory design is an approach that involves end-users in the design cycle - helping to shape and test ideas and products.
How: hands-on activities are designed to enable users to imagine and express their desired solutions for future products and services.
See ‘participatory design’ under the work section for an example of how I used this approach in workshops with BBC New Media management.
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