Leadership - User Research

Objectives: 

• • Apply design thinking principles and collaboratively create solutions that challenge traditional paradigms that are no longer responsive to today’s  student's needs

  • Evaluate strategies to support and foster a culture of innovation to support educator development and amplify student learning

User Centered Design Research

A user-centered design process is used to create new solutions tied directly to human needs and emotions.  In the process of creating new approaches to teacher professional development, our class cohort used user-centered design strategies to best support teachers, students, and administrators.  We started by identifying 7 administrators, 21 teachers, and 14 students that represented a diverse cross-section of people in our district.  After splitting up these people between the seven of us, we developed about ten questions to guide a 30 minute interview for each of our users.  During this session, I recorded the conversation so I could better engage in conversation and follow-up with questions. 

After all of the interviews, I listened to the recordings and created an empathy map, a visual organizer that breaks apart things that the users say, think, feel, and do.  Like all models, it isn't a perfect way to break apart information, but it makes it easier to zero-in on the things that someone really cares passionately about.  Since college, I have deeply bought into a user-first design process (including a course, User Oriented Collaborative Design, whose only purpose was developing a product concept from iterated user insights), but I continued to learn about new methods and remember how powerful the process could be in helping me think differently as a designer.

Below is an example of my re-processed notes for administrators, teachers, and students:

After individually compiling our research, our full team came together as a group to process.  We spent two hours sharing the key quotes and insights we gathered and compiled them into a single whiteboard.  This launched a process of generating user need statements ("as a teacher, I need _______ in order to ______"), then underlying problem statements ("how might we..."), and finally, a variety of solution concepts.  Though the solutions had a wide variety, we could always tie them back to the key needs and emotions of our users.

Reflection

After reflecting on the semester, I think we tried to do too much in a single course to get an effective user-centered design process that could produce fruit.  Our interview phase was an intense time commitment and involved a lot of re-processing of our observations.  This was a great baseline.  Then, we rushed through the middle steps that turned direct observations into strong problem statements.  We didn't return to our same users for further feedback on the problem areas to see if they really mattered to them.  Our solutions ended up having a heavy bias of our group's interests.  They certainly connected with other users' comments and feelings, but we tended to ignore some other areas based on our own values.  That isn't always a bad thing, but I felt like we sometimes twisted the process to create evidence for what we wanted all along rather than staying truly open minded.

If we had to do it all again, I would shift time away from a few of the initial interviews and reinvest that in feedback on our problem statements, giving those 1-2 weeks.  I think that would have created a stronger jumping point for strong ideas.   Given our decision to build a session to help other teachers reimagine their professional development, we actually are revisiting all of our conclusions and engaging a wider base of users.  I think this will lead to improved problem-finding and thus problem-solving.