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when I provide examples from my own research in class and I hope that you will find it interesting as well and not too outdated, even if you're watching this video maybe years after it was recorded.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.
