IDEO’s learning personas in action
You can’t learn about user needs from behind the screen, not really. To do design thinking credibly you have to get out there and start talking to humans. It’s not easy, but its worth it.
I’ve talked to a few product managers and designers over the years and everyone wants to do more of this stuff, but they’re still chained to their desks. So what gives?
After talking to some people on product coalition about it, I said I would document how we do this process at Geo for the purposes of sharing and seeing if I can inspire a few others to get out there and do it more frequently.
Here goes…
The design team and I visited Australian Healthcare week in Sydney; the future of healthcare — 5,000 delegates. Our company had a booth, so we tagged along with them. Geo has a product in the healthcare space called GeoCare so we wanted to learn a little more about the market so we can plan out the next release.
We came to learn and observe - nothing more.
Before we arrived I told the design team we’d try and use IDEO’s learning personas (from the book ‘10 faces of innovation’.)
The story goes, IDEO builds a team and allocates one of the ten personas to someone on the team, even using clients to fill some of the roles. The team members then look at the problem through the eyes of that personality. You become an actor for a day.
The ‘faces’ are broken up into 3 groups, Learning Personas, Organising Personas and Building Personas. For our 2 days in Sydney we just needed the learning personas.
WTF are the IDEO’s learning personas?
(taken from http://www.tenfacesofinnovation.com/tenfaces/index.htm)
The Anthropologist
is rarely stationary. Rather, this is the person who ventures into the field to observe how people interact with products, services, and experiences in order to come up with new innovations. The Anthropologist is extremely good at reframing a problem in a new way, humanising the scientific method to apply it to daily life. Anthropologists share such distinguishing characteristics as the wisdom to observe with a truly open mind; empathy; intuition; the ability to “see” things that have gone unnoticed; a tendency to keep running lists of innovative concepts worth emulating and problems that need solving; and a way of seeking inspiration in unusual places.
The cross-pollinator
draws associations and connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts to break new ground. Armed with a wide set of interests, an avid curiosity, and an aptitude for learning and teaching, the Cross-Pollinator brings in big ideas from the outside world to enliven their organization. People in this role can often be identified by their open mindedness, diligent note-taking, tendency to think in metaphors, and ability to reap inspiration from constraints.
The experimenter.
celebrates the process, not the tool, testing and retesting potential scenarios to make ideas tangible. A calculated risk-taker, this person models everything from products to services to proposals in order to efficiently reach a solution. To share the fun of discovery, the Experimenter invites others to collaborate, while making sure that the entire process is saving time and money.
So we pretended to be those 3 people for 2 days. This is how it went.
Day 1 — Observation
We went off into the crowds and started asking questions. Very awkward really. We visited booths that were selling everything from X-ray machines to scheduling tools for emergency departments and chatted to delegates who were just there to visit and learn how healthcare was changing.
The idea was to learn as much as we could, get some general areas of tension in the market, watch how people interact and get a line on a specific user group to try and help. We were looking for pain and looking to delight a sub-set of users.
We picked nurses. There were, after all, thousands of them, and they also use our software.
What’s apparent is that being a nurse is really tough.
They’re quitting their profession after a few years once they realise the realities of the job. What they signed up for; not usually what they get.
We became worried about the mental health implications given the stressful nature of the job and the fact the healthcare systems all over the world seem squeezed on resources. The pressure on nurses is enormous and we wanted to try and help them in some way.
We joined the nursing talks, jumped into conversations and tried to get to the human side of why someone becomes a nurse to begin with.
A note on randomly walking up to people and asking them things.
This, I actually think, is the reason people don’t do design thinking enough. And I think if more people were honest with themselves this is what’s holding them back. Finding a way to chat to someone you don’t know is really hard.
There are lots of ways to just strike up a conversation with someone but all are difficult if you don’t practice. But the only way to get human centred design insights is to talk to potential customers. When you start chatting to randoms, you can pretty much write off the first 2 hours as A-B testing your approach. Stick with it. You get there in the end. I promise.
During the conference I tried a few different one-liners early on, different areas of exhibition hall, and by the end of the day I found my feet and had a few good conversations.
What should you cover with potential users?
Who knows really. Start anywhere, but focus on pain, and stick with open ended questions.
What are the big challenges they face?
What are their fears?
What makes them keep at it? What makes them want to quit?
Where do they shop for things to make their day easier?
The important thing is we’re not really talking about software. We’re just trying to find out what makes the group tick. When they go home and complain to their families about something, what do they gripe about?
You want to get to the psychological triggers that drive behaviour. The why behind the why. (see 5 why’s)
What are all the little friction points in their day?
What problems can we solve?
How can we meet nurses needs before they need to ask for it? (This comes from another IDEO persona, the Caregiver. Someone dedicated to anticipating user needs. Think of someone who offers you a glass of water when you’re thirsty before you’ve had to ask, just as you walk into a hotel)
How can we delight this user group?
Day 2 — Ideation & Prototypes.
Nat, one of our UX designers and I revisited some users we could validate the ideas with. We went to see Sue, a nursing educator who was a straight shooting Nursing educator. We decided we wanted her and her team to review some of our ideas at the end of day 2. We checked in with her first thing so we could book in some time.
“We thought about all the problems you told us yesterday,” I told her. “So we were hoping to come back in a few hours and show you some of our ideas, maybe you can give us some feedback?”
“Sure,” she said.
So Nat and I sat down for an hour or so. Nat worked on drafting up some problem statements and user journeys while I grabbed a mobile app toolkit from sketchappsources and just started playing around with some ideas for visual prototypes. I guess Nat and I both gravitate towards different methods that help us ideate, but thats why its good to do this exercise with a team.
We messed around with the ideas for a few more hours, built a clickable prototype in marvel to show the nurses and we were done by about 11am. We had something we could show and get some feedback on, and all in less than 24 hours.
We showed it around the conference and got some wonderful feedback and new ideas. This exercise was used more to extend the conversation than to finish it.
How did the IDEO roles actually help where design thinking might not?
We used the cross pollinator role and really tried to find ideas from strange locations as inspiration. We saw an opportunity to introduce ideas from language learning videos into one of our prototypes. We also used concepts from how customer feedback is tracked at Airports and Service stations and got inspiration from those ideas too.
From the experimenter role, the prototyping here speaks for itself really. Being able to build things quickly with what we had is the key. For this role, being able to build a prototype on-site, with the tools we had, is in the spirit of the role.
Finally on the anthropologist role, we spent time observing how nurses talked from the shadows, sketching and writing things down like we were on safari. Some of the more interesting insights here was talking to someone who supplies all the clothing to the nursing community. We got to see what they carry in their bags each day.
Back at Home Base
Back at the office on Pitt street with the rest of the team, we talked about how the learning phase went and did a bit of a retro. I took the prototypes and the learnings over to the engineering team too just to give them a sense of the process and what we learned from the 2 days.
Next, we logged the new ideas (solutions really) into Productboard as discovery features, and applied a range of attributes to it, things like,
- Which segments will it benefit (what kind of users)
- Which overall initiatives do they support (what company goals will these features help us with and by how much)
- How large might these features be to build (in T-Shirt sizes)
- What our hypothesis is
And so on.
Then, later on down the track we’ll prioritise the feature in our planning session every 6 weeks.
The reason we log it into the list and not just commit it to a roadmap (or make it a candidate) is that the idea needs to be
- Compared to the alternatives, and
- Fleshed out a little more.
Not everything from a design thinking cycle has to be built.
This is really fast and really fun.
In a single 48 hours we learned more about nurses than we would have done sitting in the office reading about them on healthwhatever.com. Only by getting out and shaking hands, getting a little awkward, could we learn about the struggles of nurses day to day. You also get to validate your ideas with lots of people in a short period of time at a conference like this.
With design thinking, and perhaps this is true of a lot of product management ceremonies, you can read all the books in the world, but if you want to experience deep customer insights you’re just going to need to get out there.
Remember…
