It's that time again...we are looking for participants for our final research project as part of the Hothouse summer.  

As part of our Master in Design Ethnography at the University of Dundee, we are working on a research project to understand more about family life in busy households living in large cities. Specifically, we want to learn how your day to day family life and your family shopping activities work together (or not!). We would like to learn how your family coordinates day to day life and shopping. This information will be used to generate insights and ideas for people who design shopping services for busy families. The study is part of a masters degree project for the MSc in Design Ethnography at the University of Dundee in the UK (programme leader is Dr Catriona Macaulay, c.macaulay@dundee.ac.uk). During this final project, we are working in association with project sponsors the BBC, NCR, and a design firm in London called PDD. My team will be exploring family life in busy households in large cities in association with NCR. While I will be conducting research in New York City, my team members will be doing their field work in Paris, France and Shanghai China.

WHAT: A three-continent, multi-cultural study of how busy families living and working in mega cities (Shanghai, New York and Paris) prioritize their time around their shopping needs and balance that with family time activities.

WHO: Modern, busy families living and working in mega cities. This includes couples, single parents, families with children, or families composed of adult relatives. We are particularly interested in speaking with people working in the Design Industry.

WHERE: There are three researchers working on this project. The researchers will be located in Paris, (France), Shanghai (China) and New York (United States).

If you are in Shanghai and are interested in participating in our project, please get in touch with Lesley at: busyfamiliesinshanghai@gmail.com and if you are in Paris, please contact Paola at busyfamiliesinparis@gmail.com. If you are in New York and would like to participate (or know someone who might), plase get in touch with me at busyfamiliesinnewyork@gmail.com.

WHEN: The main field research phase will take place throughout June and at the beginning of July.

What a whirlwind of a week. We have kicked off our third and final semester of the Msc Design Ethnography at the University of Dundee - the Hothouse Summer. While the first client meetings, the intial desk research and the exploration into the overlaying topic of self-service have kept us busy, the class of #DE2012 jetted off to Barcelona half way through the week to attend the first ever European EPIC meeting (See some live tweets at #EuroEPIC) and help out as student volunteers. The meeting was held at the wonderful ELISAVA School of Design in the heart of Barcelona.

Most of our group helped with organizing the volunteers, documenting the sessions and producing photos and video of the event. I was in charge of the afternoon media team, and although the day was hectic, we captured some great images of the day and some short interviews of the attendees and organizers.

I am still trying to wrap my head around all the conversations, presentations and different perspectives...

I am working on gathering all my images and thoughts from the day and am still trying to get over the rush of sitting next to Simon Roberts of ReD Assosciates on stage during my debut at the EPIC Europe meeting :) I was honored to be presenting during the 2nd Session, in which we discussed collaborations between Academia and Industry. Below is an image of me (trying not to freak out) and also, my view from the stage (I thought, when will I get the chance again to look directly at over a hundred Ethnographers looking back at me...?) Although Eva is giving me a slightly confused look :)

Thank you so much to the amazing work of the organizers, the sponsors and especially the volunteer organizers, we all had an incredible day - both challenging, informative, and really, really fun! Especially Cat, Heinrich, Rich, Joan, Robert, Carolin, Eva, Kate, Han and Lorri were amazing at guiding and helping us volunteers through the chaos :)

We did get to enjoy a tiny bit of the Spanish sun and the beautiful architecture of Barcelona, although another visit will be in my future!

YOUR FAMILY STORY

The brief for this project asked us to do research for brightSolid, an online technology business specializing in ancestry and genealogy. I am personally very interested in the idea of memory storing and collaborative sharing of (personal) information on the web, so I was very engaged in this project from the beginning.

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

Through our initial desk research of the client’s competition and the concept of memory sharing we moved into the user-testing phase, which lead us to the concept development phase. From our research, we came up with two options for the project to move forward, one was to keep the existing findmypast.co.uk interface but make improvements based on the results from our user-testing sessions and the other was to create a new concept for the client based on our initial research and findings from what our users said about expectation and wants. We decided to move forward with our new concept because we believe that this allowed us to think of the broader challenges instead of just coming up with “band-aid solutions” to cover up current interface problems.

OUR CONCEPT

Our new concept is called “Your Family Story”, which would be a private network that allows users to tell their family (hi)stories from their perspective and collaborate with other members, while sharing and viewing stories placed in context. Humans share memories through stories. We are used to telling each other stories as we sit around a fire in cozy chairs, maybe sipping a cup of tea, gathered comfortably in the family living room. Our concept is based on the idea that there should be a “digital” version of a family living room – a comfortable place to tell our stories in the digital world.

METHODOLOGY AND PROCESS

We began our research by looking at the current family tree market, which consists of three different offerings: standalone software, online family trees and new apps that allow users to upload data from an existing family tree. We also did some in-depth research into the client’s main competitors.

This lead to some initial questions such as:
How can we rethink the family tree concept? How can we enable collaboration? Why can’t users view and tell their story from their perspective? Why aren’t these stories and relationships rooted in the context of time and place? Why can’t users import stories from existing networks and have a choice in how they share them?

From there we started considering some of the larger issues such as:
How can we communicate meaning in the digital world? What makes users come back to a network? How can services focus more on the quality of digital memories? How can we make (hi)story sharing more enjoyable?

In the next phase we conducted user-testing sessions, using the think-aloud method, followed by informal ethnographic interviews. The aim was to discover usability and functionality requirement for the use of the tree and to understand and compare where findmypast.co.uk stands in terms of family tree making experience. This led to the development of our basic concept and the first two low-fidelity prototypes.

The second physical prototype was used in the focus group session. The focus group consisted of a role-play and a follow-up discussion. The aim was to evaluate our concept of “Your Family Story”. We also wanted to find out what makes it exciting for people to learn about their ancestry and share stories.

We revisited the prototype and made changes based on the participant discussion and focus group feedback.

All of our participants fit within our defined user group and were new to ancestry research. The Participants are all University students and between 18 and 25 years old.

We had multiple ethical considerations for the user testing sessions.
We ensured that all participants were over 18 years old. We explained the project and what participation entailed. In the user testing session, we offered participants the use of an alternative email instead of their own and in both sessions, participants had the choice to use their own name or set up a fake account. Also, the family information they entered could be real or fake.

We faced some challenges during our research. During the user-testing session, there were two different versions of the family tree live (original and new beta version 3.0) and we didn’t have control over which version our users would be using, so it was difficult to prepare for the session. We also had some problems with the think-aloud protocol where users described all their actions in the beginning but became less engaged and vocal throughout the session.

We were also very aware that because we as researchers prompted the participants with specific tasks, the participant’s motivations and therefore actions might have been influenced. During the focus group, we found that it is hard to explain our abstract concept in a short period of time without giving all the details.

We also felt that the participants weren’t as engaged with the physical prototype as we had hoped, however, after the discussion the participants were much more engaged.
From these challenges, we took away some lessons for the future. We believe that engaging with the participant, while avoid influencing their actions should be more of a focus during the user testing sessions. This also includes being more aware of the limitations of our research methods and to consider supplementing the research with additional methods. We also think we need to make sure to always communicate the concept clearly to avoid participant confusion. 

FORWARD THINKING

Through our development of the “Your Family Story” concept, we developed three opportunity spaces, which we think could be areas of interest for further research and development for brightSolid.

In order to ensure that our concept would become a profitable part of their business offering, the network must have longevity and ensure that users will come back to the site. Our participants shared that “if a family member added a story it would give (them) reasons to come back.” To assure that users are engaged, we believe the language of the interface is especially important – In the focus group, the users shared with us that receiving updates sounds “clinical” and that they would much rather receive a notification saying “Someone has shared a new story with you.”

In order to bridge this gap we believe the “Your Family Story” site can include physical versions of the stories the users create as part of their offering. The participants shared with us that they would like to see a function with which they could build a family tree, tell the stories and then share a physical version of the “family story” in a storybook with their granny for example.

We believe the “Your Family Story” concept can help families build their family story and share it with each other in a meaningful way.

TEAM MEMBERS:

Lena Blackstock

Lesley Han

Li-chuan Chiang

As part of the workshop for the Experience Research 2 module, our group organized a "DE tour" with which we tried to give our client an insight into what Design Ethnography is, how it works, and how it can lead to new opportunities for them. We organized 6 stations around the college and at each stage we introduced a step of the DE process.

This was a group effort by the DE class of 2012. Find out more about our group on the Voice of Experience blog HERE: http://designethnography.dundee.ac.uk/voe/students/. Here is a glimpse at what we came up with:

PHASE 1

Each project begins with desk research to understand what has gone before, and to gain a grounding in the key concepts involved. Additionally to scholarly documents, we look at social media, newspapers, magazines, and any other user generated sources on the topic. Our goal is to bring together a variety of sources to get a holistic view of the problem space. This process of desk research continues throughout the project to include new research ideas as our understanding of the problem grows.

PHASE 2

At the very beginning of the project, our whole class went to Glasgow for a day to visit such stores as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, WHSmith and Boots that have self-service checkout machines. After we came back to Dundee, we started to recruit participants for interviews and shop-alongs, as well as doing more observations in the stores. The methods we used for recruitment included asking around our friends and colleagues, posting messages on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and posting message on the University’s weekly circulating email. 

PHASE 3

People behave differently from what they say they do, and by observing them we can compare the observed reality with what we are told. We observe people, as well as the environments and interactions that affect people's experiences in a space. This is complemented by interviews to ask more of people's behaviours and reasons behind them. Our purpose is not just watch and ask, but to notice and compare and characterise by asking “why?”.

PHASE 4

Good data management ensures that we are prepared for analysis. Audio transcriptions are an opportunity to reflect, and reading each transcript two or three or even more times allows us to get into the details and the issues behind the obvious. Those findings are labeled and captured in the hot report. The hot report also captures context; the setting of the interview and our impressions from the participant. This makes it easier for the client and other researchers to retrace the interview situation.

PHASE 5

Analysis and Synthesis are iterative processes in which we begin to look for the patterns, themes, outliers and finally the stories of the participants. This is a repetitive, non-linear and collaborative process in which we are constantly quizzing the data. While the the analysis phase is about breaking it all into parts, the synthesis phase is about bringing everything together and viewing the data holistically. This process of sense-making is contingent and allows us to understand context in context.  

Since starting the Design Ethnography program here in Dundee last August I have made sure I document all work and projects as best as I could...until March hit. Here is an attempt to wrap my head around what happened in the past six weeks...

The last few weeks have been a blur. We completed the Experience Research 2 Module, in which we undertook an ethnographic research project of the Self-Service space.

Immediately after our client workshop and final presentation, we jumped into the next project for the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and Usability Engineering module. In a short but intense week and a half we worked on a research project for brightSolid, an online publishing and technology company, rethinking the family tree concept and creating a platform to share and store memories as stories (not just data). This was also the last module for our second semester and leads us into semester three, during which we are undertaking a three month industry project - Houthouse Summer 2012.

It feels like we only just met in the DE studio and I cant believe it's almost all over already...