Designing to Address a Problem w/o Solution Ideas

Hello and welcome back.

So let's say that you want to design an interface to help somebody,

you want your system to be useful but you may not know exactly what

problem needs to be solved to best help your users.

This is actually a very common situation, many of the most creative solutions

are successful not only because their good at solving a user's problem but

because they have identified the most clever problem to solve.

In situations like that,

your job as a designer is to find the right problem to solve.

And personally I found it really helpful to answer four questions.

I need to identify my target audience and

other potential stakeholders who may influence the context.

I need to understand the challenges they currently face and

the strategies that they're currently using to address these challenges.

People are generally clever and inventive so

beginning with their solutions is generally a good idea.

I think it's also really important to understand what values

users have that influence the kinds of technological approaches

that they may see as acceptable.

This sounds a bit abstract, but

let me give you a concrete example from my own research.

Generally my students like it when I provide examples from my own research in

class and I hope that you will find it interesting as well and not too outdated,

even if you're watching this video maybe years after it was recorded.

I wanted to help people who are trying to maintain recovery from substance use

disorders.

I knew that this is a huge problem worldwide and

there are many ways to approached it but

long term recovery really benefits from a strong social support network.

And for many the most accessible and free way to

find a group of life minded people and recovery Is by attending 12-step meetings,

you've probably heard of these from movies or books.

So these are meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.

My research is also focused on supporting human relationships and

I thought that this was a fascinating context where strengths of relationships

could mean the difference between recovery and relapse.

My first step was just spending a lot of time with people in recovery.

I conducted a six month study using a technique known as

participatory observation.

During the course of this time period I attended 132 open 12-Step

meetings where I announced myself as a researcher.

I also participated in 18 organizational service structure meetings at

the group and regional level.

I conducted a literature review of currently available technologies for

recovery and reviewed and documented the artifacts of the program like the bulletin

boards, information pamphlets and meeting scripts that were used in meetings.

This immersion period really helped me understand who my audience was, and

begin having some ideas of the challenges that they faced.

To find out more about these challenges and the strategies they use to address

them, the values my participants had and just in general more about what their life

was like, I conducted in-depth interviews with 12 recovering addicts and alcoholics.

All participants that I interviewed had multiple years of continuous

abstinence from drugs and alcohol and were very familiar with the program.

Every participant who volunteered,

already used technology to support their recovery in multiple ways.

For example,

they might try to finding a meeting online using a directory or an app.

They took part in online recovery forums.

They augmented in persons' sponsorship in Skype or email.

And they used apps that tracked various aspects of their recovery like how many

meetings they went to.

However one of the challenges that it may be hard for

people to discuss their values in general.

Values are frequently implicit and in the background of our daily lives and

we don't really think about it until something feels like it's going against

those values.

To make it easier for participants to reflect and explicitly discuss values,

I've provided them with brief sketches and

write-ups of six technology ideas that they could critique.

Now, I'm not going to go through each of these here but to give you two examples.

Meeting Spot is a rating website similar to

Yelp if that's the thing where you live, where people can discuss,

review and provide logistical information about the meetings they go to.

Recovery Tube is like YouTube for recovery stories that lets people share their

stories with others through anonymized animated videos in supports its search,

tagging, and commenting on these videos.

Participants in my study were able to discuss at lengths which features of tech

ideas they found appealing and which seemed they would be problematic, or

may even go against the values of 12-step recovery programs.

Based on this process, I was able to identify

key implications to guide the source of problems I should solve.

I began having a general understanding of how to design and

how not to design for this context.

I learned about the importance of supporting social interaction rather

than just delivering information.

I learned that anonymity in these groups is not just about protecting privacy.

But rather about this idea that everybody in a meeting is equal.

And I learned that face-to-face contact is absolutely at the core of these programs

and should be supported rather than replace with technology.

These implications are tenants that I can use both in deciding which problems to

tackle and evaluating whether a proposed solution is sensitive to the values and

priorities of the community I'm working with.

I could now take the opportunity to generate a diverse set of potential

solutions within the constraints outlined by my formative work.

Now, this is just one example, and this approach is really

most relevant when you're looking for the right problem to solve.

One thing I want you to notice is some questions that don't appear on this list.

The naive approach is directly asking the user what solutions they want,

what technology you should build, or for ideas on how to solve the problem.

And these are just not the right questions to ask.

Usually users are experts in their own lives but

they're not experts in technology.

You're the technology expert.

And knowing what's possible is a big part in figuring out the right problem and

the right solution.

You can't expect your users to have these answers for

you unless they're very unusual users.

Instead, work with your users to understand the challenges, strategies,

and values.

These are points where your users are experts, and

these can really help inform your work.

Use these points as inspirations and implications.

So in this video, I gave you an example of a context where the designer

didn't know what problem to solve at the outset.

I went into detail in one such example.

I didn't really explain all the methods, but

you will learn a lot more about the specific methods and techniques for

carrying out user research when we get into course two of this specialization.

But I hope this video gave you a basic idea of when a more open-ended

approach may be appropriate.

You can read more about the described work of people in recovery from substance use

disorders if you have access to the ACM Digital Library.

I'm providing you a link on the slide.

Thank you for listening and I hope to see you in the next video.

Introduction to UI Design

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