How to Get Away with Research
Hello and welcome back to this week’s episode of How to Get Away with Murder!
*AHEM*
Did I say Murder? I meant Research!
- Disclaimer: No researchers were harmed in the making of this sprint.
A Television…that moves? (The Final Chapter)
The last time you heard from us, we were finishing up our pretotype testing and just starting to synthesize all of the qualitative data we gathered. What we came to learn were three major lessons when it comes to affinity diagramming:
- Schedule big chunks of time for it — 3-hour blocks MINIMUM
- Take breaks — bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, anything to let the dust settle on the data for a few minutes before getting back to it
- Do it in person — (if it’s safe and logistically possible!)
We came to learn these lessons only at the small price of our sanity.
Just kidding, I’m being slightly dramatic. But we did get the chance to confront conflicts head-on and learn how to mitigate disagreements politely and effectively while maintaining a positive energy and good group morale. These three lessons are now guidelines that we have set into place because we recognize that they allow us to do our best work together.
But enough about our process, what about the insights we actually generated? Well, here’s what we learned:
People want to have collective experiences when watching with other people
When participants engaged with the TV content alongside their peers, they would visibly express their reactions and commentary on different aspects of the TV content, ranging from the narrative to the visual production. Although each participant may have different reactions and feelings towards the TV experience, collectively, participants’ commentary, reactions and opinions created a shared perspective on the TV experience that became a topic of discussion and social conversations.
People choose to watch TV because they can easily switch their attention to and from other tasks
Depending on the context in which they were watching TV, participants treated the TV as either a primary or secondary task. Whereas some participants would leave the TV on while washing their hands or walking within their physical environment, others would sit idly and watch the content, undisturbed by other devices or activities. However, because the TV content keeps playing regardless of the participants’ behavior, participants could easily adjust their attention towards the content as they pleased. They could choose to either passively intake TV content or actively engage with it.
People want the TV experience to adapt to their existing lifestyle
Across all think-aloud sessions, the majority of participants expressed the importance of comfort in their TV viewing experience. In particular, when asked to wear additional devices to watch immersive TV content, most participants prioritized comfort over immersion, expressing that the wearable devices felt unnatural and took away from the TV experience. Participants treated TV as a sedentary activity, and thus valued the accessibility of the TV experience in their home environment. They valued autonomy in the TV experience, ranging from TV controls to content selection, if it helped them adjust the TV to fit their daily activity and viewing habits.
People want gratification from the TV content and not the process of obtaining it
Regardless of the type of control participants used, all participants expressed their need to quickly and efficiently access the content they wanted to watch. Participants typically begin the TV experience with a pre-existing goal in mind: although they may experience gratification as they navigate and control the TV, they desire gratification only from the resulting content that they would like to access. Consequently, regardless of whether participants chose to use voice, gestures, or a combination of both, participants expressed frustrations when using unintuitive TV controls because it delayed their content-viewing experience. To them, the destination is far more important than the journey.
Now, these are far from our be-all-end-all conclusions. We still have a lot more data to comb through from our primary research and conceptual prototype that we hope will validate these insights but also bring new ones to light, so on that note…
Where in the World Is [Participant X]?
The Diary Study Saga (Epilogue)
Our diary study has officially come to a close, as I’m sure our participants are greatly relieved about! We are extremely aware of the time and effort our study demanded so we feel grateful to have been working with participants who were such good sports and dedicated to being as helpful as possible. Our participants included people from various parts of the world and at least four different time zones so we are excited to have had the opportunity to learn from and about such a diverse pool of people.
This week, we have been conducting post-diary study debriefing interviews to gain insight into our participants’ thoughts and reflections around their daily activities and interactions with technology. We still have a few more debriefing sessions to go but we aim to start synthesizing the data we have collected from the diary study as early as this weekend!
The Contextual Inquiry Chronicles — Continued
As for our contextual inquiries, they have also been successfully underway with eight interviews completed thus far and three more scheduled for later this week.
We initially intended on conducting two different kinds of contextual interviews: one aimed towards examining experiences with television and another aimed towards examining experiences with emerging tech, however, we have slightly pivoted from these original intentions. Our research goals have evolved greatly since week one of working on this project — (can you believe it’s already week 9?) — and so our research methods needed to evolve along with us. Especially as we have begun to incorporate greater consideration of synthetic content and its potential role in the future of digital television, we came to realize that emerging technologies are simply an inherent part of the future of television experiences, but they do not make up the experience itself. Therefore, we incorporated our most important considerations and questions about emerging technologies into our television-oriented protocol in order to capture data around the experiences that lie in the intersections of the two.
The Adventures of Conceptual Prototyping
This is our last simultaneously conducted research method, I swear!
With a fun and engaging problem space like television, we believe it’s only right that our prototypes, even the conceptual ones, be fun and engaging as well. How can participating in a research study be fun, you might ask? Well this time, we’re playing a game!
The Thing From The Future is an imagination game made by the Situation Lab that challenges players to speculate about potential futuristic scenarios and realities based on thought-provoking prompts. We slightly modified the game by replacing the “Object” cards with all kinds of digital mediums and emerging technologies in order to orient the game towards digital-based solutions.
By playing this game with three different groups of four participants, our goals are to:
- Evaluate user needs within the realm of digital content
- Speculate the trajectory of these needs in the near-to-distant future
- Acclimate participants to a more future-thinking headspace
- Gain insights into the solutions they envision for themselves without the constraints of the present
See you next time!
This sprint has definitely seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of what it means to be on a team and conduct research so we hope that you’ve enjoyed reading our updates as much as we’ve enjoyed keeping you informed. Every week, we feel truly grateful for the work we’re doing and the relationships we’re building so if you’ve participated, supported, or just kept up with us, thank you!
Well, that about wraps things up for Team Patent Pending but we can’t wait to catch up with you next time!
