In Part I of this blog entry, I described how people's attitudes and behaviors don't always correlate. This can be described as a cognitive dissonance. In this blog entry, I will describe more about how peoples' behaviors and attitudes are embedded within different knowledge levels. As designers, we can appropriately access these knowledge levels to learn more about our user's experiences, fears, aspirations, and latent needs. Using this new knowledge, we can design products and services with a more effective user-centric approach.
Part II: Understand the user's experience domain
As designers, we must do a better job understanding how people shape experiences that they create from the outside world. We must become aware of how they collect, filter, process, store, and share information. In the article Contextmapping: experiences from practice (PDF), Elizabeth Sanders explains that user experiences occur in a context where memory and imagination meet. In order to learn about potential future experiences, we need to understand peoples' dreams and fears, and their aspirations and ideas.
In addition to what Sanders says, we also need to learn about gaps in knowledge that users are having during interactive experiences. As designers, we need creative ways to access and identify this valuable information. What makes this challenging is these experiences are expressed and accessed within different knowledge levels. Some experiences are on the surface and others are deep within. In order to understand how our users understanding and communicate their experiences, we must implement appropriate methods. These knowledge levels are described below with methods to access this information.
Knowledge Levels
Explicit Knowledge
Explicit knowledge can be easily described. It is knowledge that can be written down, spoken, and shared. Naming all 50 US states, writing down the lyrics of your favorite song, or explaining how to use Google Maps are all examples of explicit knowledge. This sort of knowledge is easily accessed and is on the highest cognitive level. This is knowledge that describes current and past experiences, but lacks a connection to future experiences like dreams, aspirations, and fears. Some methods you can use to access people's explicit knowledge are:
- Interviews – These can be structured or unstructured and must not be leading or biased. They provide immediate insight to a user's declarative and procedural understanding of a given topic.
- Storytelling – Storytelling is a useful method of recalling a subject's contextual experiences, memories, and feelings. It also provides us a showing of body language, gesturing, and voice tone that can be insightful in understanding the emotional magnitudes of each experience.
- Explaining Directions – Having a person explain how something works provides us many cognitive clues. We can identify how they problem solve procedurally, the extent of their their prior knowledge they have in the experience, whether they have created heuristical approaches, as well as, if they have knowledge gaps or confusion points in the process.
- Journaling – Allowing a person to capture and document experiences and memories in a journal is a powerful method in generating rich data. Unlike storytelling, a journal allows for referencing, editing, adding, and constructing the pages that reflect the person's thoughts. These journals can include personal notes, drawings, sketches, and photographs. They are inexpensive to purchase and maintain, portable, and easy to use.
Observable Knowledge
Observable knowledge can be shown by action and procedure. Drawing a map of all 50 states, putting together a jigsaw puzzle or playing a favorite song are examples of observable knowledge. This level of knowledge is easily accessed, and is stored at a deeper cognitive level. This knowledge will describe current and past experiences, but lacks a connection to future experiences like dreams, aspirations, and fears. Some methods you can use to access people's observable knowledge are listed below.
- Mental model drawings – A mental model is a picture in our heads that represents our understanding of how something works or behaves. It's a block of stored information that is a collaboration of our prior knowledges and experiences. An effective way to understand a person's mental model is to have them draw or model how an object, system, or situation works. If the person begins drawing an incomplete or incorrect model, we can identify gaps in their knowledge and further probe to understand why these gaps are occurring.
- Acting out behaviors – Have you ever watched American Idol and seen the contestant introduce himself as saying he has the most talented voice? The moment the vocals come out though, the audience quivers at the talentless noise that sounds. People's perceptions of their own behaviors don't always reflect other's. Having a person act out behavior can present immediate details in how they process information. For example, ask someone to describe how they shave. The information will be very procedural. Then give them a razor and have them demonstrate and verbalize the process to you. Not only are you observing process, but a contextual behavior story unfolds. This story may provide ergonomic, gestural, emotional, and latent need insights.
- Using objects in context – Malcolm Gladwell, describes a wonderful example of how people display biased perceptions when the situation occurs out of context in his book Blink. To understand fully how and why a person interacts with an object in a particular way, observe them in the natural environment.
Tacit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge is not easily shared or written down. It is the knowledge of discovery and creation. It stems from our desire to know more, to create something new, original, playful, challenging, and satisfying. Tacit knowledge is deeply embedded within our cognition. Examples of tacit knowledge are creating an abstract painting, sculpting pieces of clay into a vase, navigating yourself through an unknown city, and swimming the freestyle. The following methods can be used to generate tacit knowledge:
- Collaging – Collaging is an excellent, generative process method to discover a user's latent thoughts. Combining photos, scraps of paper, newspaper articles, and materials that are familiar to create a collage can allow the user to recall embedded memories and experiences. These recallings can catalyze further exploration and discovery to personal fears, dreams, and desires.
- Co-Discovery – Co-Discovery is a participatory method that uses two or more people to communicate, problem solve, and discover common goals. Each person verbalizes and acts out their thought process. This integration may be achieved through sharing of stories, collaging, modeling, and brainstorming new ideas.
- Model Making – Letting people create an object or model without much direction can provide insight into their tacit knowledge. Give a subject a piece of clay, and tell them to sculpt quickly anything that comes to mind. Afterwards, have them verbalize and present what they created and why. Additional steps may be to provide them more materials that are unrelated and continue to construct. These models, in their crude nature, may spawn new creative, and personal insights to their dreams, motivations, and aspirations.
Conclusion: Making Better Products or Services
I have described how our user's behaviors and beliefs can be quite different. To understand why, we needed to understand that our experiences and perceptions are embedded within different knowledge levels. These knowledge levels can be easily and quickly recalled, or deeply embedded and latent, where methods of discovery and creation are needed to access them.
We can use this valuable information to help us create and focus on better user-centric products or services. This information can be analyzed and evaluated using a grounded theory approach to generate common behavioral patterns. Once these behavioral patterns are identified, designers can then:
- Generate and rank user needs and design objectives.
- Modify business, organizational, and technical requirements.
- Create sociographic personas and storyboards.
- Design appropriate documents, prototypes, and representations.
- Implement, test, and refine concepts.