OBSERVATION
When creating insights for your products and services, observation is a great place to start. It’s the time when you can sit back and watch as your customers go about their day to day, you can see what works well, what challenges they face and how they work around them. Observation helps you uncover the unspoken problems and focuses your energy on what you want to learn more about.
Let's get started with a simple warm up...
– Source: Photo of contents of my bag ALStarr75
Getting curious, what’s in your bag?
This is a photo of the contents of my bag, the items inside tell you a bit about me.
Write down:
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What can you see?
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What do the items tell you?
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What makes you curious?
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What questions does it make you want to ask?
Try this with friends, family, colleagues or even willing strangers.
Get uncomfortable and focus...
Get out of the places in which you are comfortable and familiar. This will make it easier to leverage the power of ‘fresh eyes,’ and to bring new insight and understanding to a problem or situation. Focus on paying attention to specific moments that you don’t normally tune in to
Stay neutral and focus on the objective. Sometimes, we jump ahead and feel we might know why people do certain things.
This is especially common when we are observing people we know personally or when designing for groups we think we know pretty well
It’s great to develop hunches for the ‘why’ driving the behaviours you see, but it’s important to stay curious. Many factors influence the choices people make and behaviours people have. Give yourself the time and space to ‘listen with your eyes’ without worrying about jumping to conclusions behind the ‘why’ just yet.
Some tips for Observation:
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Look for things that prompt behaviour
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Look for adaptations / workarounds - needs that are not being met
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Look for what people care about
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Look for body language
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Look for patterns / themes - what people value
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Look for unexpected
Things that prompt behaviour, adaptations, body language, patterns and the unexpected are ripe for rich interpretation. Similarly, stretching yourself to look for actions, environments, interactions, objects and users will push you to observe from different angles, and to help illuminate non-obvious clues that point to people’s underlying needs and motivations.
Create your plan...
Before you get out there and start observing you need a plan! Think about the following:
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WHO TO VIEW:
What types of people do you want to observe in order to learn
and get inspired?
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WHERE TO GO ONLINE:
Where can you observe your target audience online? Are they
on social media?
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WHERE TO GO OFFLINE:
Where can you observe your target audience in the real world?
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WHAT THINGS TO WATCH FOR:
What are you curious to learn? What themes will you be
looking for?
Now you have your plan, so get out there and observe...
Once you have completed your observations, you need to identify what you want to learn more about, what did you find curious?, what questions did your observations make you want to ask?
Why not read Design Thinking - Identify Extremes >