Let’s dispense with this little turd blossom right up front: Henry Ford never said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse,”
– it’s simply an myth
This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research with an emphasis on Focus Groups. This is part of the introduction to ux research series. In this talk we walk through the basics of focus groups, types of focus groups, as well as an in-depth explanation of process and pitfalls.
Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.
Conducting focus groups for a website redesignJ. Todd Bennett
Focus groups are a valuable tool for gaining qualitative insight and feedback from your website audiences. They can be conducted throughout a redesign project as needed, whether at the beginning to identify major issues and gain a better understanding of user needs or later in the process to refine language and gauge reaction to visual designs, imagery and messages.
Are you curious about the concept of Social Media Listening?
Then read on as these few slides explain it in a very easy to understand manner. If you're new to Social Listening it'll be your first step towards developing a complete understanding.
If you're familiar with it, you can use these slides to explain it to your peers, managers or your clients
A look at how organizations can use social listening and analysis as input into their social media and business strategies. Shares case studies, use cases, and processes.
Let's talk about the job of a product manager and how to do it really well. Based off of this post: https://medium.com/@joshelman/a-product-managers-job-63c09a43d0ec#.v0kdyf816
Project management is more than, "just do your job". All projects have stakeholders and their perception is reality when it comes to influences projects: the best case - stakeholders improve project roll out, utility, and adoption. The worst case: … well, roads are paved with projected intention. Draw upon design thinking, user experience, and digital marketing techniques to improve stakeholder involvement with examples for change management, product management, and tactical tools for an enterprise-level project to manage 'What’s In It For Me?'
TOPIC: A HOW TO approach to dealing with a crisis with Social Media. This is the third in a series of online trainings brought to you by The Wall Street Journal, Ogilvy and GoToWebinar. Asia Pacific director of Digital Influence Thomas Crampton moderated a presentation by Digital Influence Global Managing John Bell and Managing Director of the Global Public Affairs Practice Jamie Moeller.
Conducting focus groups for a website redesignJ. Todd Bennett
Focus groups are a valuable tool for gaining qualitative insight and feedback from your website audiences. They can be conducted throughout a redesign project as needed, whether at the beginning to identify major issues and gain a better understanding of user needs or later in the process to refine language and gauge reaction to visual designs, imagery and messages.
Are you curious about the concept of Social Media Listening?
Then read on as these few slides explain it in a very easy to understand manner. If you're new to Social Listening it'll be your first step towards developing a complete understanding.
If you're familiar with it, you can use these slides to explain it to your peers, managers or your clients
A look at how organizations can use social listening and analysis as input into their social media and business strategies. Shares case studies, use cases, and processes.
Let's talk about the job of a product manager and how to do it really well. Based off of this post: https://medium.com/@joshelman/a-product-managers-job-63c09a43d0ec#.v0kdyf816
Project management is more than, "just do your job". All projects have stakeholders and their perception is reality when it comes to influences projects: the best case - stakeholders improve project roll out, utility, and adoption. The worst case: … well, roads are paved with projected intention. Draw upon design thinking, user experience, and digital marketing techniques to improve stakeholder involvement with examples for change management, product management, and tactical tools for an enterprise-level project to manage 'What’s In It For Me?'
TOPIC: A HOW TO approach to dealing with a crisis with Social Media. This is the third in a series of online trainings brought to you by The Wall Street Journal, Ogilvy and GoToWebinar. Asia Pacific director of Digital Influence Thomas Crampton moderated a presentation by Digital Influence Global Managing John Bell and Managing Director of the Global Public Affairs Practice Jamie Moeller.
What is Digital Strategy? presentation explains the role of digital strategy in easy to understand language.
This is a presentation from the online course 'Crash Course to Digital Strategy' that you can sign up to on Skillshare for $20 http://skl.sh/VOj2ol
Pay with a tweet to download - http://www.paywithatweet.com/pay/connect.php?id=3bc9bee2cfdc011872fc15e896cbd108
Looks at answering what the role of a Digital Strategist is in an Advertising Agency. A relative of the Communications Planner, Strategic Planner and Account Planner, Digital Strategy concentrates on understanding the digital consumer, brand, media and creativity.
Looking at the core skills of Insight Mining, Communication Planning and Digital Metrics for success.
Thanks to Mark Pollard, Ana Andjelic, Mike Arauz and the many other Digital Strategists who helped me work out this bloody hard question.
Platform Revolution - Ch 01 Intro: How Platforms are Changing CommerceMarshall Van Alstyne
Content: (1) Evidence platforms beat products in value, recognition, speed (2) Platform definition (3) Firm implications
These slides provide complimentary course materials for the Ch 1 of Platform Revolution - How Network Markets are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. Final slides provide reading supplements and links to other chapters for industry and academia.
We’re Leaking, and Everything’s Fine: How and Why Companies Deliberately Leak...Ian McCarthy
Although the protection of secrets is often vital to the survival of organizations, at other times organizations can benefit by deliberately leaking secrets to outsiders. We explore how and why this is the case. We identify two dimensions of leaks: (1) whether the information in the leak is factual or concocted, and (2) whether leaks are conducted overtly or covertly. Using these two dimensions, we identify four types of leaks, which we term informing, dissembling, misdirecting, and provoking. We also provide a framework to help managers decide whether or not they should leak secrets.
Multi-sided platforms are the superior way of doing business today. This content will help you define a marketplace business with the network effect. All network orchestrators must perform well at least 4 functions listed in this presentation.
Startup Metrics 101: a Product & Marketing WorkshopDave McClure
This presentation demonstrates a simple, actionable 5-step model for measuring startup metrics. The 5 steps are: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, & Revenue (AARRR!). The presentation also explains how to use the model to make better product & marketing decisions for your startup.
Created by Dave McClure & Hiten Shah, presented at Web 2.0 Expo SF on Tue 4/22/08.
Understand Your Customers' Social BehaviorsCharlene Li
Introduction to socialgraphics and the Engagement Pyramid, a way to understand your customers in addition to traditional demographics, psychographics, etc. Research forms the foundation for your social strategy. Presented by Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group, on January 20, 2010. Recording is also available at blog.altimetergroup.com.
The 10 Stages of the Business Lifecycle (by Jurgen Appelo)Shiftup
Like in a PlayStation game, we can visualize the typical lifecycle of startups and scaleups as a number of stages or game levels.
Let’s have a look at the levels of the Shiftup Business Lifecycle:
This manual is dedicated to all young people who are willing and committed to raising their voices and utilize their time and resources to increasing awareness of sexual and reproductive health and rights including ending sexual/gender-based violence and supporting a healthy sexual and reproductive life.
The experience is the product (for Mind The Product 2016)Peter Merholz
The field of user experience emerged to compensate for poor product management. When we recognize that "the experience is the product," it becomes clear that these two fields are closely aligned.
Here is a link to the updated version of this presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/khornberger/social-media-research-with-focus-on-twitter-and-misinformation
This slideshow offers teachers items for students to consider before they begin using social media for research.
What is Digital Strategy? presentation explains the role of digital strategy in easy to understand language.
This is a presentation from the online course 'Crash Course to Digital Strategy' that you can sign up to on Skillshare for $20 http://skl.sh/VOj2ol
Pay with a tweet to download - http://www.paywithatweet.com/pay/connect.php?id=3bc9bee2cfdc011872fc15e896cbd108
Looks at answering what the role of a Digital Strategist is in an Advertising Agency. A relative of the Communications Planner, Strategic Planner and Account Planner, Digital Strategy concentrates on understanding the digital consumer, brand, media and creativity.
Looking at the core skills of Insight Mining, Communication Planning and Digital Metrics for success.
Thanks to Mark Pollard, Ana Andjelic, Mike Arauz and the many other Digital Strategists who helped me work out this bloody hard question.
Platform Revolution - Ch 01 Intro: How Platforms are Changing CommerceMarshall Van Alstyne
Content: (1) Evidence platforms beat products in value, recognition, speed (2) Platform definition (3) Firm implications
These slides provide complimentary course materials for the Ch 1 of Platform Revolution - How Network Markets are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. Final slides provide reading supplements and links to other chapters for industry and academia.
We’re Leaking, and Everything’s Fine: How and Why Companies Deliberately Leak...Ian McCarthy
Although the protection of secrets is often vital to the survival of organizations, at other times organizations can benefit by deliberately leaking secrets to outsiders. We explore how and why this is the case. We identify two dimensions of leaks: (1) whether the information in the leak is factual or concocted, and (2) whether leaks are conducted overtly or covertly. Using these two dimensions, we identify four types of leaks, which we term informing, dissembling, misdirecting, and provoking. We also provide a framework to help managers decide whether or not they should leak secrets.
Multi-sided platforms are the superior way of doing business today. This content will help you define a marketplace business with the network effect. All network orchestrators must perform well at least 4 functions listed in this presentation.
Startup Metrics 101: a Product & Marketing WorkshopDave McClure
This presentation demonstrates a simple, actionable 5-step model for measuring startup metrics. The 5 steps are: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, & Revenue (AARRR!). The presentation also explains how to use the model to make better product & marketing decisions for your startup.
Created by Dave McClure & Hiten Shah, presented at Web 2.0 Expo SF on Tue 4/22/08.
Understand Your Customers' Social BehaviorsCharlene Li
Introduction to socialgraphics and the Engagement Pyramid, a way to understand your customers in addition to traditional demographics, psychographics, etc. Research forms the foundation for your social strategy. Presented by Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group, on January 20, 2010. Recording is also available at blog.altimetergroup.com.
The 10 Stages of the Business Lifecycle (by Jurgen Appelo)Shiftup
Like in a PlayStation game, we can visualize the typical lifecycle of startups and scaleups as a number of stages or game levels.
Let’s have a look at the levels of the Shiftup Business Lifecycle:
This manual is dedicated to all young people who are willing and committed to raising their voices and utilize their time and resources to increasing awareness of sexual and reproductive health and rights including ending sexual/gender-based violence and supporting a healthy sexual and reproductive life.
The experience is the product (for Mind The Product 2016)Peter Merholz
The field of user experience emerged to compensate for poor product management. When we recognize that "the experience is the product," it becomes clear that these two fields are closely aligned.
Here is a link to the updated version of this presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/khornberger/social-media-research-with-focus-on-twitter-and-misinformation
This slideshow offers teachers items for students to consider before they begin using social media for research.
Introduction to Focus Groups, Odum Institute, October 30egeisen
An introduction to conducting focus groups for social science research. The course includes information on developing protocol guides, moderating focus groups, analyzing results, and reporting findings.
Civic Design: User Research Methods for Creating Better Citizen Experiences
Building tech tools informed by input from real users is essential. Without feedback from the intended users, you’re making design and tech decisions in the dark. User testing can help! Learn how to carry out effective user testing to build better civic tools.
Cyd Harrell, UX Evanglist, Code for America
Kavi Harshawat, 2014 Code for America Fellow
Watch the video online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipjLBcBD21I&index=21&list=PL65XgbSILalVoej11T95Tc7D7-F1PdwHq
Get involved with Code for America: http://www.codeforamerica.org/action
Portigal Consulting: Reading Ahead Research Findings reduxSteve Portigal
Presentation of research findings from our project on the evolution of reading and books. After we've lived with the results and been out sharing them with different audiences, the material starts to evolve, as well as incorporate changes that are happening around us.
EuroIA14 - Well, We've Done All This Research, Now What?Steve Portigal
One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of user research in business is that projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. We’ve long heard the lament “Well, we got this report and it just sat there. We didn’t know what to do with it.” But design research (or ethnography, or user research, or whatever the term du jour may be) has also become standard practice, as opposed to something exceptional or innovative. That means that designers are increasingly involved in using contextual research to inform their design work.
Ongoing acceptance of design research has increased the ranks of designers and others who feel comfortable conducting user research. But analysis and synthesis is a more slippery skill set, and we see how easy it is for teams to ignore (more out of frustration than anything malicious) data that doesn’t immediately seem actionable. This workshop gives people the tools to take control over synthesis and ideation themselves by breaking it down into a manageable framework and process.
“It’s More of a Mindset Than a Method”: UX Practitioners’ Conception of Desig...colin gray
There has been increasing interest in the work practices of user experience (UX) designers, particularly in relation to approaches that support adoption of human-centered principles in corporate environments. This paper addresses the ways in which UX designers conceive of methods that support their practice, and the methods they consider necessary as a baseline competency for beginning user experience designers. Interviews were conducted with practitioners in a range of companies, with differing levels of expertise and educational backgrounds represented. Interviewees were asked about their use of design methods in practice, and the methods they considered to be core of their practice; in addition, they were asked what set of methods would be vital for beginning designers joining their company. Based on these interviews, I evaluate practitioner conceptions of design methods, proposing an appropriation-oriented mindset that drives the use of tool knowledge, supporting designers’ practice in a variety of corporate contexts. Opportunities are considered for future research in the study of UX practice and training of students in human-computer interaction programs.
Introduction to AgileUX: Fundamentals of Customer ResearchWilliam Evans
This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research for AgileUX teams. We talk about the reasons for doing real research, how to conduct on-site contextual interviews, the process to use, and how to analyze and social the results from the research.
Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product in the context of an Agile development process. In addition, research seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers user products in their particular context and feed those findings immediately into the scrum's decision-making and development process.
User Research takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive. In AgileUX Product design, contextual inquiry and other methods of user research asserts that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, so that AgileUX Teams are always making product design decisions on actual customer feedback and behavior, and not opinion or instinct.
Design thinking is a problem solving process geared for ambiguous situations. There are four principles of design thinking: empathize, visualize, co-create and iterate. This presentation gives tips and techniques for empathizing includes how to interview and how to analyze research data.
You aren't your target market. - UX Research BasicsAngela Obias
Originally presented in an IT Entrepreneurship Ideation class in the Ateneo de Manila University, February 2015.
Bare-bones advice on how to get minimum, but necessary, validation about the class's digital product ideas.
How to make presentation (cs sigma)(c.e.-1 sem)Hemin Patel
How to make presentation
1) Planning a Presentation
2) Analysing Audience and Locale
3) Make contact with your audience
4) Simple Outline
5) Organizing
6) Manuscript Technique
7) Managing the Question-Answer Session.
You, Me, and Accessibility: Empathy and Human-Centered Design ThinkingApplitools
In this session, accessibility advocate Erin Hess addresses key questions including what are the most common accessibility (A11y) categories, where to consider A11y in the SDLC, and what the intersection of software and empathy looks like. She explores human-centered design thinking as a tool and demonstrates how empathy can drive innovation. Watch the on-demand recording at https://applitools.info/0vu
Have you ever wondered why your horoscope can predict your future, or what motivates people to report false information on a survey? These phenomena can be explained by everyday biases that can drastically impact user research studies. This introduction to bias in user research describes a number of biases we encounter in everyday life, and explains their impact in a user experience study.
Senior Experience Researcher, Leah Samuelson, will help identify common biases, explain where they arise in user testing, and note best practices for avoiding them to get the most accurate data.
ProductCamp Boston is the world's largest and most exciting
crowd-sourced one-day event for product people. It's
organized by and for product managers, product marketers and
entrepreneurs, so attendees get the most out of the day.
Attendees learn about and discuss topics in product
management and product marketing, product discovery,
product development & design, go-to-market, product strategy
and lifecycle management, and product management 101,
startups, and career development.
www.ProductCampBoston.org
A mini workshop designed to prepare teams with the knowledge and practice they need to better understand their problems and project gaps, determine appropriate participants, ask the right qualitative questions, and gather information in an unbiased and thoughtful way.
Similar to Introduction to UX Research: Conducting Focus Groups (20)
Empowering Agile Self-Organized Teams With Design ThinkingWilliam Evans
My experience and research has shown that design thinking empowers employees and teams, enabling them to create a more resilient, value-focused organizational culture.
Innovation-driven growth at the organizational level requires a multidisciplinary approach to designing systems that create the right conditions for self-organizing teams to explore and create while maintaining system hygiene. To achieve that growth, leaders and managers must adopt a strategy for fostering new thinking, practices, and processes that convert strategy both laterally and vertically into new value. To foster the right kind of environment, you must manage the boundaries of the teams, establishing the right cadence and rituals to ensure trust and psychological safety.
“Organizations that operate from the authoritarian, hierarchical, command and control model, where the top leaders control the work, information, decisions, and allocation of resources, produce employees that are less empowered, less creative, and less reductive.” – Journal of Strategic Studies, Creativity and Innovation: The Leadership Dynamics.
In this talk, we’ll discuss boundaries, policies, cadence for self-organizing teams, then cover the key principles and practices of design thinking and how it can be leveraged by agile teams to collaboratively test new options and create new value. Design thinking all comes down to the collaboration utilizing divergence and convergence: acquire and synthesize insights, formulate hypotheses, prototype solutions, and ruthlessly test them with real customers.
We’ll cover that with a case study of how an infrastructure engineering team transformed themselves from waterfall to agile, while learning the key practices of design thinking to reduce the lead time for delivering services and systems from 9 months to days, and in some cases, hours.
The key aspects of Design Thinking we’ll cover:
The importance of trust, boundaries, and candor for team dynamics;
Customer-Centricity. Who are they? What are their challenges? What are their ‘jobs-to-be-done’?
Empathy and Understanding to engaging with customers in their context;
Validate through experimentation that the team is solving the right problem;
Bringing the whole team together to collaboratively explore the problem space and engage in divergent and convergent exercises;
Prototype lightweight solution hypotheses to ensure that the problems are solved before scaling out and investing in delivering the product or service to customers;
When design thinking is appropriate, and when it’s a waste of time (when a user story is simple, simply do it!)
Facilitating Complexity: Methods & Mindsets for Exploration William Evans
An updated presentation delivered at PwC in Melbourne Australia
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean, Design Thinking, Theory of Constraints, and Service Design with global enterprises from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. He works with a select group of clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will earned his Jonah® from AGI, and serves on the Board of Advisors for Rutgers CX (Customer Experience). Formerly, he was Design Thinker-In-Residence at NYU Stern.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he brought LeanUX, Lean and Kanban to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
Will is passionate about coffee, so much so that he started his own brand of organic single-origin coffee beans. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUXNYC conference, Founded the AgileUX NYC conference, and was also the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013/2014 conferences.
Leading Organizational Design and TransformationWilliam Evans
In this talk, Organizational Designer and Strategy consultant Will Evans poses these five provocative questions which he will explore with wit, a bit of biting sarcasm, and a healthy dose of compassion:
How can companies develop product design processes that help the organization adapt to change when nobody likes change?
How can companies foster emergent innovation within the organization while spending all day in countless meetings?
How can leading enterprises approach digital transformation when they all seem to fail miserably at it?
What are the principles of a resilience strategy for companies that can’t seem to figure out what the hell they are doing?
Why is becoming a “Design-Driven Organization,” so damn hard, probably a pipe dream, and why most advice from experts, consultants, and UX thought-leaders isn’t just wrong, it’s probably a fraud?
Learn new frames to revitalize your product design organization, to gain cooperation, to improve strategic thinking and creative problem solving, to boost performance, and to extract maximum benefit from new options.
In this talk, we’ll hope to discuss:
Designing organizational resilience.
Move from competing agendas to organizational alignment.
See the “big picture” of the complexities of systems-wide change.
Enable creativity and flexibility in problem solving.
Leverage problems & dilemmas to enhance organizational strategy.
Ready your organization to create new options.
On Context: Methods and Mindsets for Situational AwarenessWilliam Evans
It could be argued that tribes, communities of practice, organizations, and societies accrete symbolic systems that forge a common language over time to accomplish tasks usually related to the preservation, extension of power, and access to resources needed to continue to flourish and allow these networks within boundaries to feel a sense of agency and empowerment. Indeed, when one group or tribe within a larger ecosystem feels threatened or produces radical new ideas, the heretical rebels leverage common metaphors, symbols, and tactics to achieve strategic goals – at first rebelling against the existing power structure (writing manifestos, throwing molotov cocktail), supplanting the existing “high priests”. Eventually, though, they develop the same rituals that previous power structure utilized to maintain and extend their power base – the heretics eventually become the high priests of a new caste system and then anoint their own saints.
We have seen this evolution in social systems and the accretion of ‘webs of signification’ in the context of IT in general and software design and development in particular. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs,” which can inform our understanding of tribes in a software enterprise setting. With each new principled-based movement within IT, from RUP to Agile, to Lean Software, to Lean UX and more recently DevOps and Lean Startup, the new tribe has the need to extend it’s power base beyond the context for which it was originally intended. Even if each tribe armed with their own methods and practices makes sense at a given time and place, this does not necessarily mean it’s appropriate or strategic from a systems, wholistic, enterprise, or societal perspective.
This notion is important in making strategic decisions from an enterprise perspective in terms of which ideology to deploy, how to allocate resources, and how to ensure that across the portfolio of potential ‘bets’ the appropriate methods are deployed. This tension – between tribes that wish to enjoy greater agency by proselytizing their ideology and methods into other domains, and the needs of the organization, which seeks balance across multiple competing factions to actually achieve enterprise-wide goals, is the primary challenge faced by leaders.
We’ll explore these notions, and seek to understand the various roles, practices, and methods that are either local-optima or more global in perspective, to seek to provide a framework for decision-making in uncertain and turbulent times. We’ll unpack the relationship between different horizons from probable to possible, and provide some heuristics for when things like Design Thinking or LeanUX are most appropriate, and when Agile, PMBOK, or ITIL frameworks might be the most authentic satisficing lens through which to make decisions.
Dispositioning Advantage: A Pervert's Guide to Strategy DesignWilliam Evans
Strategy. The identification and exploitation of an opponent’s weakness. Before you can have Strategy Deployment (Policy Deployment, Hoshin Kanri), it tends to reason that you probably need a strategy to deploy. But how do you do that? What are the mechanisms? What are the methods? What are the principles that allow an organization to design a meaningful strategy?
This lively 45 (to 60 minute) romp will introduce you to the history of strategy in organizations (it’s dark, perverse, and full of dragons) from Porter to Rumelt, to Dettmer, and Boyd. Few will remember that in the early days of strategy, there was only one: drive down the experience curve and be the low-cost provider with a stream-lined supply chain. The talk will unpack what strategy actually is and more importantly, what it is not. It will painstakingly deconstruct how the term is ritually abused and misused, and then methodically introduce how strategy is a design problem, but too important to be left to the designers in their plaid shirts, funky glasses, and ernest but ultimately vapid proclamations about human-centered blah blah, validating blah, blah, buzzword bingo verbal diarrhea inventing flaccid constructs like ‘design strategy, content strategy, ux strategy’ and ‘strategic planning’.
The talk will introduce some conceptual frameworks used in military strategy and maneuver warfare, which dates back over 2,300 years to the time of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. We’ll explore how the time-tested principles of economic and military competition can be applied to social and commercial ventures, such as software and service delivery leading to considerable benefits in coherence, focus. and profit. We’ll then introduces a reasonable, systematic set of methods to help you translate current market uncertainty, fast changing customer needs, and ever-changing technological disruptions into a meaningful strategy and organizational capability ready for Hoshin Kanri.
New Models of Purpose-Driven Exploration in Knowledge WorkWilliam Evans
The last 20 years have been a period of radical disruption and transformation in knowledge work. The "why, what, and how" of new value creation and delivery in knowledge-intensive work is shifting and the power has moved from the center to the edges. In his talk, Evans will explore the emergence of new methods of exploration, abductive ideation, and empirical validation that is changing how value creation happens. The very idea first introduced by Buckminster Fuller, when he said that everything was becoming ephemeralized—doing "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing"—or more recently when Marc Andreessen said, "software is eating the world," has had a direct impact on information-seeking and information-synthesizing behaviors. Evans will unpack how many of these models and methods are really the exaptation of Lean, Systems Thinking, and Design Thinking principles, transplanted from the world of manufacturing into the ephemeral world of knowledge work and knowledge management. He'll finish by showing how these models can frame the challenges posed by sense-making (experiential) change in knowledge work.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, Theory of Constraints, and Service Design with global enterprises from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer, he works with a select group of clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will earned his Jonah® from AGI, and serves on the Board of Advisors for Rutgers CX (Customer Experience) Program. Formerly, he was Design Thinker-In-Residence at NYU Stern.
Facilitating Complexity: A Pervert's Guide to ExplorationWilliam Evans
A talk given at the Melbourne Cynefin meetup. A set of riffs on how to facilitate teams exploring the Complex Domain.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, DevOps, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at New York University's Stern Graduate School of Management.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he brought LeanUX and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in service design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network alanysis & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect working in Knowledge Management, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference now in it’s 6th year, founded the LEAD SUMMIT NYC, and was also the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
Good Design is Honest: Cognitive Science to UX Design PrinciplesWilliam Evans
This is a simple introduction to the cognitive science of perception leading into an exploration of user experience design principles as well as fundamentals of visual design.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, Theory of Constraints, and Service Design with global enterprises from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer, he works with a select group of clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will earned his Jonah® from AGI, and serves on the Board of Advisors for Rutgers CX (Customer Experience) Program. Formerly, he was Design Thinker-In-Residence at NYU Stern.
Will was previously the Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow. Before that, he served as Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world’s leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he brought LeanUX, Lean and Kanban to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl – a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
Recent talks:
Introducing The Theory of Constraints
Exploration & Exploitation Mindsets in Design-Driven Enterprises
Redesigned to Disrupt: A Systems Thinking Approach
Design Thinking: Beyond the Bounds of Your Own Head
Introduction to Kanban for Creative Agencies
Framing LeanUX: Epistemology and Complexity in Product Design
Introduction to Lean UX Branding
NOTE: All the *experts* say you shouldn't have text on slides. This presentation has no text on slides.
New principles and methods like UX, Design Thinking and Lean Startup have proven themselves useful for many organizations at the tactical level, but larger organizations are still governed at the strategic decision-making level by outmoded management theories which have difficultly handling uncertainty and constant change. Introducing ideas like UX, Lean and content strategy at the operational and tactical levels of the organization may only allow for incremental change to existing offerings - innovation at the fingertips, but not the core of their business which is being disrupted. If large media companies are going to mitigate the risk of future disruption, they will need to learn to be disruptive themselves.
Evans will explore the application of systems and design thinking as well as Lean Startup in the content publishing space and showcase real world examples of innovation applied at all three levels of organizations: strategic, operational and tactical.
To understand LeanUX, we'll introduce Lean, Lean Systems, and Lean Startup to situate LeanUX in context. This introduction and discussion will use Kanban to explore various aspects and ideas of LeanUX such as hypothesis formulation, assumptions gathering, multi-hypothesis testing and designing / running experiments to create tight feedback loops of customer insight.
We'll cover aspects of LeanUX research, which is conducted to gain a validated understanding of the user's problem hypothesis to understand if the problem we think customers have, is something they actually have before spending months and tens of thousands of dollars doing wasteful UX research & design time on a concept that delivers no customer value.
We'll also discuss lightweight techniques for sharing the research process with the entire team, covering the basics of customer research, interviewing, cognitive biases in user research, and how to create light-weight, rapid personas for solution hypothesis validation. We'll then cover collaborative ideation, designer pairing, and how lean teams work together to reduce batch size and increase the flow of customer business value increments - concepts mostly unheard of in product development teams following agile or waterfall ideologies.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he has brought Lean Startup, LeanUX, and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference, and is the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
Introduction to Kanban for Creative AgenciesWilliam Evans
This is an introduction to Kanban. Creative agencies, like most organizations that do knowledge work, are defined by the projects they deliver that (hopefully) delivers value for the clients. Most agencies also struggle with multiple competing stakeholders, multiple client engagements, tight deadlines and long hours – it’s amazing any creative work happens at all. Most projects – brand campaigns, websites, landing pages, social, pr, direct, everything, can be viewed as a process - a series of steps or tasks that achieve some desired result – delivery of the project, a happy client, drinks in Tribeca. There are all kinds of processes - simple and complex, individual and team, quick and time-consuming. Sometimes large or over-arching processes consist of a series of smaller processes.
Kanban is a tool for managing the flow of materials or information (or whatever) in a process. Not having the materials, whether it is a part, a document, or customer information, at the time you need it causes delay and waste. On the other hand, having too many parts (too much design, creative briefs, design assets, code) on hand or too much work in process (WIP) is also a form of waste. Kanban is a tool to learn and manage an optimal flow of work within the process. It can also (potentially) make working in agencies a more human, and humane, place to do one’s best work.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he has brought Lean Startup, LeanUX, and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference, and is the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
By WIll Evans, Director of User Experience Design, TLC Labs
"What people say is not what people do" - Cheskin
There has been a lot of hot air about "getting out of the building", and "just go talk to customers", but rarely are those statements backed up with strategic and tactical advice about HOW and WHY. Well, this talk is meant to help. Honestly, getting out of the building and talking to customers is only valuable when done right. As my old martial arts sensei used to say, "practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect!"
Design Ethnography is usually conducted to gain a *deep* understanding of the our target customers in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the product strategy. Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive.
One primary difference between ethnography and other methods of user research is that ethnography assumes that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons they give for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, before we can assign to their actions and behaviors interpretations drawn from our own experiences.
Many people believe that design ethnography is only viable in the context of "Big Upfront Design", while many Agile and Lean teams believe they simply don't have the time, or that big upfront design is synonymous with waste. During this talk, we'll explore various myths, methods of ethnography, and ways in which agile or lean teams may use it to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors to create richer experiences without waste.
Questions I may answer in this talk:
What is design ethnography?
What are some of the qualitative and quantitative methods?
Isn't Design Ethnography and LeanUX contradictory?
When and where is design ethnography appropriate for teams?
Is Design Ethnography appropriate only with Big Upfront Design Research?
How can teams use Design Ethnography for sense-making?
What are the practical steps for engaging in design ethnography tomorrow?
Will Evans is the Director of User Experience Design and Research at The Library Corporation as well as TLCLabs, the enterprise innovation lab. At TLC, Will is responsible for working across the organization to create extraordinary user experiences and new product innovations.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com.
Mr. Evans’ research and design has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, The Econom
Introduction to UX Research: Conducting Focus GroupsWilliam Evans
Let’s dispense with this little turd blossom right up front: Henry Ford never said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse,”
– it’s simply an myth
This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research with an emphasis on Focus Groups. This is part of the introduction to ux research series. In this talk we walk through the basics of focus groups, types of focus groups, as well as an in-depth explanation of process and pitfalls.
Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
2. People do not know what they want. They barely know
what they need, but they definitely do not know what they
want. They’re conditioned by the limited imagination of
what is possible. … Most of the time, focus groups are built
on the pressure of ignorance.
Massimo Vignelli
3. "It's really hard to design products by
focus groups. A lot of times, people
don't know what they want until you
show it to them.”
- Steve Jobs
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 3
4. Let’s dispense with this little turd
blossom right up front: Henry Ford
never said, “If I'd asked customers what
they wanted, they would have said "a
faster horse,”
It’s not even a useful lie!
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 4
5. What are focus groups?
The concept of focus groups was developed in 1930’s
by psychoanalyst Ernest Dichter as a social research
method
Focus groups are structured interviews that quickly
and inexpensively reveal a target audience’s desires,
experiences, attitudes, and priorities
Focus groups can be a useful technique when a
company needs a lot of insight from potential or
existing customers in a short amount of time
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6. What are focus groups?
Focus groups are good at uncovering people’s desires,
motivations, values, and first hand experiences.
In a focus group, people generally feel comfortable
revealing their thoughts and feelings, thereby sharing
their views on issues and assumptions that are at the
core of their experience of a product.
With the right question, the right group and the right
moderator, focus groups can yield useful insights.
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7. When to do Focus Groups?
In product design, focus groups are used early in the
design cycle when the team is generating ideas and
seeking to understand the needs of the target audience.
Early in the design cycle, focus groups can help the
company understand:
User’s fundamental issues and perceptions of the product
What users believe are the important features of the product
What types of problems users experience with the product
Where do users feel the product fails to meet their
expectations
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8. When to do Focus Groups? (cont.)
Later in the development process focus groups can
help the company identify and prioritize features to
build and release in the product
Knowing why people value certain features can determine
what gets developed and in what order
Focus groups also serve as a platform for generating
ideas of what users wish to see in future releases
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9. Focus Groups cannot be used to
unequivocally prove or disprove a
hypothesis about the user experience
of a product.
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10. When NOT to do Focus Groups?
When the objective is to acquire usability information
A group of people can’t provide specific information regarding
product features without structured usability testing sessions
When seeking to understand the perspectives of the bigger
population
Quantitative data that is generalizable to the bigger population
requires surveys or other methodological approaches that require a
large sample of participants
There is no guarantee that proportion of responses in the group
matches that of larger population of users
Although focus groups are an excellent way to gather
motivations and insights from the users, it cannot be used to
unequivocally prove or disprove a hypothesis about the
user experience
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 10
12. Exploratory Focus Groups
Typically conducted in the beginning of a design cycle
Uncover users’ general attitudes on a given topic, allowing
product designs to
See how their users will understand their product
What words users will use to speak about it
What criteria they will use to judge it
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13. Feature Prioritization Focus Groups
Generally held at the beginning of the product design cycle
when the outlines of the product are clear.
These groups focus on features of the product that are most
attractive to the users, with an emphasis on why they are
appealing.
Underlying assumption of this type of focus group is that
that the participants are interested in the product, with
discussion focusing on what kinds of things they would like
the product to do for them.
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 13
14. Competitive Analysis Focus Groups
Aims to uncover what attracts and repels users with respect
to competitor’s sites
What associations do users have with the competitor?
What aspects of the user experience they find valuable?
Where does the product satisfy users’s needs and where does it not
suffice?
What emotions does the product evoke?
How do users identify with the product?
This type of focus group is often conducted anonymously
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 14
15. Trend Explanations Focus Group
Generally held in either a re-design part of the development
process, or in response to specific emotional or functional
issues in product development
Exploring the trends of users’ behaviors, needs, and
expectations within and across products.
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 15
17. How to conduct Focus Groups
Assemble your team
Make sure you have a good cross section of product, ux, marketing
and development.
Create a schedule
A good schedule provides sufficient time for recruiting, testing,
analyzing and integrating results
Define your users
Recruit participants who are your users and thus likely to provide the
best feedback – usually 6-8
Define the scope of your research
What is the complexity of your questions?
What is the depth at which you wish to explore the answers?
This will determine the number of people and the number of groups
that need to be conducted
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 17
18. How to run your Focus Groups
Choose a topics for discussion
On average, 3-5 topics per 90 minute focus group
Create a discussion guide
Consider the “core” questions you and your product team
are trying to answer and prioritize them
Establish roles
Who will moderate? Who will take notes? Who will lead the
discussion afterwards
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 18
19. Asking Good Questions
Questions should be:
Carefully ordered, thus positioning participants within a
certain frame of mind, containing an intuitive flow
Non-directed: should not imply an answer. Example:
“How difficult do you find this feature?”
Open-ended: general enough not to constrain answers to
a specific responses (limit yes-no questions)
Focused: focused on specific topics you are investigating
Personal: people love to generalize their experience to the
bigger public; create questions that concentrate on person’s
current behavior and opinions without many opportunities
to project their experiences onto the general public
Unambiguous: clear and concise, with few shades of
meaning.
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 19
20. Example Discussion Guide
Warm up and introduction (approx. 15 min)
Introduction of moderation
Ice breakers for participants
Outline of the process
Main topic discussion
Moderate group discussion that focuses on specific questions you
and your company have regarding a product.
Wrap-Up
Final thoughts and reflections
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21. Warm Up & Introduction Tips
Telling participants that they were chosen to be part of
the group allows them to feel more comfortable with one
another
Informing the group of the purpose of the session focuses
their attention to the desired end goal
Clearly set out expectations and “ground rules” for
discussion (no blocking, interruption, flow of discussion)
Acknowledge any potentially anxiety provoking features
of the environment (camera, mirrored wall) to help
people feel more comfortable
• Inform participants of their rights to participation
Freedom to leave at any point, confidentiality of their thoughts
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 21
22. Main Discussion Tips
Probes and follow-up questions are extremely useful
They dig deeper into any given topic
They clarify what people mean when they state their opinions
My definition of “useful”, “clear”, and/or “good” may not mirror
other people’s definitions of there terms.
Probes help create a common definition of terms, and alleviate
potential misunderstandings between the researcher and participant.
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 22
23. Context Is King (not content)
Comfortable environment is key to a lively discussion
Limited interruptions
After the session begins, no new person should join the session so
that the dynamic isn’t altered by another person’s presence
Food is encouraged
Eating is an informal activity that often breaks tension in any group
No noisy snacks that disturb the conversation
Seating order
Have a 10-15 minute social time before the focus group starts so the
moderator can identify introverts, extroverts, and alpha-jerks
Videotaping advised
Human interaction is incredible complex. Since the moderator is
part of the group dynamic, it is helpful to videotape the sessions in
order to capture gestures, and other subtle interactions
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 23
24. John McLaughlin is a perfect
example of a bad moderator
and a douchebag: highly
opinionated, clearly biased,
with a tendency for
dominating the discussion
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 24
25. What about the moderator?
Group moderation is a skill
Basic skills any moderator should embody are:
Respect for the participants
Ability to listen closely to other’s perspectives
Ability to think fast on multiple levels simultaneously.
The moderator must be able to predict the direction of the
conversation and drive it toward a desired direction,
without the participants realizing that they are being
moderated.
This can be accomplished via moderator’s subtle cues, tone, and/or
body language
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 25
26. Effective Moderation
Control
Moderator should always be in control of leading discussion towards
answers to questions, and deterring tangents
Good time management
The flow should be monitored so that introduction of topics is at
appropriate times, transitions are intuitive and natural.
Participant-focused
A moderator should mediate the discussion, rather than expressing
opinions
Respect
All participants should feel comfortable and have a voice, alpha-jerks
managed
Preparation
Moderator should have sufficient knowledge of product space
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 26
27. Effective Moderation Tips
Spend time with participants beforehand to get a sense of who
is quiet and might need more attention
Stick to the guide but be flexible enough to stray away from
the script when necessary
Engage ALL participants in the discussion
Avoid introducing new terminology and concepts
Be mindful of body language
Clarify any comments & restate ideas and opinions to ensure
everyone is on the same page
Probe for alternative opinions on any given topic
Don’t dominate the discussion, allow the group to lead
Provide the group with time to think & give a break when
necessary
Use humor when appropriate and keep the energy level high
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 27
28. An electronics company was testing a
new boombox they hoped to start
selling. Their research included focus
groups where they showed the two
colour options: yellow and black. The
participants were in agreement that
yellow was the best colour because it is
vibrant and energetic. At the end of the
focus group they were each allowed to
take a boombox home and could
choose yellow or black.
They all chose black.
– Steve Mulder, “The User is Always Right”
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29. Common Obstacles
The moderator is not an objective observer
Moderator affects the group dynamics and discussion
Focus groups reveal the way people think and not the way
they actually behave
Opinions from focus groups may be limited to the
participants in the sessions
The sample may be biased for more reasons than just small size
and therefore cannot be adequately extrapolated to represent the
bigger population
Reticent individuals are often silenced by outspoken ones
Data may be biased toward those who speak up
“Vividness effect”
People often provide examples of situations that are most
emotionally vivid to them.
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 29
30. Common Obstacles
Overly talkative participants
When people are clearly talking without a purpose, ask them kindly to wrap
up and move on: Moderate the extroverts, probe the introverts.
Group dominance (The Alpha-Jerk Effect)
A single dominant/bullying participant can ruin the focus group
Unqualified participants
At times people misunderstand what the participation criteria are, or
misrepresent their experience
Tangents
They can be useful for discussion of values and ideas, but should be wrapped
up quickly and redirected to main discussion point
Hostility & Offensive Ideas
Vehement disagreement or offensive ideas can lead people in the group to
feel uncomfortable. The moderator should redirect conversation to the
focusing on the ideas behind any given perspective: Go Meta!
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31. Researchers must continually
be careful to avoid the trap of
selective perception
- Richard A. Krueger
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 31
32. What data to collect?
Focus groups produce a ton of potentially useful
information which can be extracted by means of:
Transcripts
Quotations
Observer opinions
Models
Videotapes
What information should be prioritized depends upon how
what form of data answers your question, and how quickly
you need to synthesize the results.
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 32
33. Analysis Steps
Capture the initial hypothesis
During the debriefing (occurring with little time lapse from focus
group to retain memory), discuss with other observers thoughts
regarding the groups' opinions and feedback
Transcribe and code
Video interaction should be transcribed and themes/trends of
opinions should be extracted via coding
Coding is a method of extrapolating ideas from the
transcripts and categorizing the responses (thus generating
quantitative data).
Your codes (general categories) should be short, concise,
descriptive in nature, and accurately depicting a users’ single idea.
01/13/13 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko 33
34. Coding Framework
Top-down
A hypothesis of what types of themes the participants’ transcripts
will generate already exists and is confirmed using the data
A pre-existing model is applied to the data.
Bottom-up
The data is explored without pre-existing framework in mind,
generating themes based on the responses in the transcript.
The model is generated using the data.
This methodological approach to extracting themes from focus
group interviews is recommended since it is less biased and more
true to the data.
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35. Extracting Trends in Data
Mental models
Mental representations of how your users understand the way the
world or a product works
Values
What do people like and dislike and what criteria do they use to
establish their opinions
Stories
Stories are a powerful way that people capture their unique,
subjective experiences, and provide details about their
assumptions, order of doing things and ways of solving problems
Product pitfalls
Brainstorms during focus groups can produce a list of problems
that users experience using the product
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36. Getting the most out of the data
Questions to read for
What are reasons behind people’s opinions?
What terminology do people use and do products
speak their users’ language?
Where do people contradict themselves?
When do people change their minds and how does
that reveal their actual values and perspectives on a
given product?
What do people consider to be important and is the
product that is popular actually important to them?
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