What:
Interviews with key stakeholders using structured questions designed to bring to the surface assumptions and understanding of underlying issues.

Why:
Everyone makes decisions based on how they understand and perceive the world. At the start of large projects it is important to understand the various viewpoints of key stakeholders. A good design process should challenge stakeholders to go beyond their current assumptions, ambitions and knowledge.

When:
At the start of the project.

How:
As our own assumptions are often hidden from ourselves interviewers need to ask the right kinds of questions designed to bring to the surface:

Knowledge and understanding
What is the central issue/challenge?
What knowledge is missing?
Mental maps and assumptions about the wider world
What are their assumptions and concerns about the future?

Point of departure
In what context does the company/service currently operate?
What contradictions and tensions exist?
What are the current strengths, weaknesses and vulnerability?

Example:
Interviews can highlight organisational blind-spots. What is not said is sometimes the most important thing to notice. In interviews for the BBC Kids ID project, paedophiles were unmentioned by interviewees despite being seen to be the biggest threat to children on-line. As a result the team consulted charities and trusts working with paedophiles and their victims.

A huge assumption had been made internally that the main threat to children comes form adults. Interviews with Childline revealed that a substantial threat comes from other children - both sexual abuse and bullying.

Stakeholder interviews also revealed that people who make policies to safeguard children seldom consult children directly.

What:
A ‘picture of now’ describes the context in which an issue, a service or an organisation exists. It describes  Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors. (PESTLE)

Why:
New products and services do not exist in a vacuum. The  issues  surrounding a  problem are much bigger than we often imagine. Before designing future services or scenarios it is important to have an accurate picture of the present.

Maps are only useful when the user knows where they are.

When:
The picture of now research should be carried out in the discovery phase - early in the project development cycle. It can be referred to and used throughout.

How:
A picture of now is formed by collecting data that represents best current knowledge in each area of research (PESTLE). This may be past and current (but not predictive) trends research from reliable sources and expert interviews. The key is to understanding factors that underlie the trend, this can help you decide if the trend is likely to continue and how it affects your issue. Systems thinking is useful for uncovering these dynamics.

Example:
Before developing  scenarios for the future of interactive TV we needed to have a detailed picture of the current state of  play and the forces that would drive future change and have most impact.

I led a team of researchers who investigated:

Audience behaviour
Industry (technologies and policy)
Society
The Economy
Deeper trends (change over a longer period with potentially radical implications)

To bring this data to life we created a street scene to house our key facts. Different zones corresponded to key themes emerging out of the research.

In workshops we explored which trends were most surprising to our clients and which would have most impact on the sector.

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.

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.

Experience (or gap) analysis is a tool which can be used to identify the differences between a users expectations of a service and their actual experience. People’s experience of a product or service will certainly be influenced by their expectations and prior knowledge.

Experience analysis will uncover areas for improvement in the service itself or the way it is perceived. It can be a useful way to identify new opportunities for innovation or to test prototypes.

Example
In the BBC stories at Kew project we administered two surveys, one before people tried and tested the mobile guide on location and one after the experience.

The first helped uncover people’s previous experience of mobile guides, their expectations of what this guide might do, how it would function and what type of experience they desired.

The second survey uncovered people’s actual experience of using the guide in situ.

The outputs of the survey were both quantitative and qualitative. Through careful selection and segmentation of 100 + users we were able to compare the expectations and actual experiences across a range of demographics – age, individuals and family groups, familiarity with technology.

What:
Involves observing and probing end-user behaviour in a real world setting. This could be a home, an workplace or any place in which a service or product is Interviews combinine loosely structured interviews and observations.

Why:
To gain an understanding which goes beyond simple interactions and offers insight into the context of use and environmental factors.

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.

Movement maps track the locations and movements of several people over a period of time within a specific environment.

Since media is now present all around us and increasingly consumed outside the home context awareness is key to creating the right kind of services.

Because many people live localised lives with set routines, it is important to understand the place sand journeys that are important in their lives.

Example: This map shows an the area within a thirty minute walk of a teenage characters home  - we highlighted the most significant places, people and journeys in her daily life

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.

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.