The document describes a workshop on generative research techniques to understand customer motivations. It discusses that generative exercises using hands-on activities can elicit deeper emotions and insights compared to traditional interviews. The workshop covers different types of exercises like lists, stories, sorting, mapping etc. It provides examples for each exercise type and guidelines on prototyping, testing and iterating an exercise with users. The overall goal is to help participants design customized generative exercises and apply them to learn about customer needs and inspire new product ideas.

1. Powerful Techniques to
Understand your
Customers Motivations
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP
March 2018

3. Misael
Sandra

4. March 2018
Power Up your
Product through
Research and Design
UX TEAM BY NEARSOFT

5. Hello!
Who are you?

6. ● Intro: What’s Generative Research
● Explore different exercises
● Prototype your exercise
● Iterate your exercise
● Showcase & Wrap Up
Our Time Together
RAPID PROTOTYPING WORKSHOP

7. ● Customer input for a meaningful solution
● Products must fit lifestyle of users
● Human mind is complicated
Why this workshop?
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

8. What to ask next?
Conversations with users
can feel incomplete...
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

9. Become a better listener
and reach a shared
understanding
Make a conversation
unfold naturally and
achieve a strong rapport
Get rich information on
users’ motivations,
expectations
We’ll learn how to...
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

10. Discover ways to get
stories full of emotion and
detail
Learn from the
participant’s own insights
about themselves
Feel true empathy to
generate a solution
We’ll learn how to...
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

11. Participants create an
artifact with their hands
Because...
Generative Research
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

12. Why?
?!
Hands-on exercises to
enable conversations?
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

13. What we say
How we feel
(gap)

14. interviews / surveys
observation
generative
tools
say
think
do / use
know / feel / dream
What people... MethodsSurface
Deep

16. Easier to think
when we make stuff
with our hands
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

17. Creativity, thought,
and action are driven
by our emotions
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

18. Remember, select, talk about, and interpret past events
Describe behavior, thoughts, and feelings
Connect the dots of seemingly disconnected events
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP
Recollection Exercises

19. Talk about sensitive topics
Express abstract feelings and thoughts
Verbalize unspoken emotions
Projective Exercises
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

20. GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP
UX Design Process

21. GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP
Type of Exercises
LIST MAD LIB STORY SORT TRACK
BUILD DIAGRAM MAP PLAY HYBRIDS

22. 1. Low effort to complete but yield rich discussion.
2. Collecting elements of a category —e.g. “Types of meals I cook.”
3. Gathering feelings and needs around a topic
4. Compiling inventories —e.g. “What’s in my bathroom cabinet?”
Lists
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

23. A List combined with a Diagram
to show priority of elements.
The inner circle is the highest
priority while the outer circles
are of least importance.
Concentric
Circles of Priorities

24. Participants list their experiences
before, during, and after 1-on-1
meetings with team members.
Timelapse List
Before
During
After

25. 1. Eliciting associations, desires, preferences, values
2. Gathering participant’s own words around a prompt to evaluate
symbolic meanings associated with the topic
3. Used to assess motivations and attitudes
4. Easy to create and offer high value results!
(Sentence completion)
Mad Lib
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

26. Good for evaluating symbolic
meaning.
Participants projecting their
perspectives on ideal values for
a newcomer during recruiting
process.
Sentence
Completion

27. Understanding the preferences
and attitudes of young people
when redeeming promo codes in
restaurants.
Complete Sentences
+ Sketches

28. 1. Learning about negative & positive events
2. Exploring a category —understanding perspectives and values
around a topic
3. Gathering lessons learned
4. These are best as solo-work to enable enough time for
reflection
Story
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

29. Snags & Delights are mini-stories
about negative and positive
experiences on recent events.
Mini Stories

30. A letter can help to understand
the impact of past choices on a
participant’s current state.
Letter to myself

31. The Love and
Break Up Letter
A personal letter written to a
product often reveals
profound insights value and
expectations from objects in
everyday lives.

32. 1. Identifying and exploring categories. Relationships among
elements (leads to uncovering mental models)
2. Learning about preferences and priorities (when participants
rank order elements)
3. Remembering stories (when participants select or sort
images)
4. Create a deck of triggers/images collaboratively (it helps
eliminate gaps in your individual thinking)
Sort
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

33. Card sorting
Increasing a system’s findability.
Give users a set of cards, each
labeled with a piece of content or
functionality.
Ask them to sort them into groups
that make sense of them.

34. Card Sorting
Scenario-based sort with
multiple decks: larger
cards with scenario
elements and smaller
cards with social media
elements.

35. Association Deck
Photo deck to choose images that
best fit certain criteria.
Exercise to redesign travel-related
site. Participants were given
photos, typefaces, and moods so
they could react to an unbranded
site.

36. 1. Recording behavior, routines, feelings over time
2. Gathering photos from participant POV —empowers your
participants!
3. Enabling awareness of automatic behavior around a topic
4. Good platform for comparing moments —e.g. Does this log
reflect what is normal?
Track
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

37. Mood Calendar
30 day Mood Calendar to track
emotions, key moments, and
provide a platform for follow-up
discussion.

38. Diary Study
Snippets of experiences during a
period of time.
Useful to spot patterns difficult to
identify by recall.
A template is used to log
moments.
Source: Designing for Sustainability link

39. 1. Using metaphors & analogies to express hard-to-articulate
ideas
2. Capturing moods & feelings
3. Generating future scenarios
4. Participants need lots of time to create and explain
Do not rush!
Make
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

40. Lego Simulation
Participants were given Lego
pieces to build a city.
The goal was to simulate sprints
under an Agile environment.

41. Cut-out Interface
Cut-outs of design elements for
participants to use to build paper
prototypes, prioritize features, add
new features, etc.

42. Timeline Board
In this exercise we had
participants (Millennials) plan their
financial future.
Manual activity forces them to
imagine their future selves and
discover ways insurance fit into
their story.

43. Ideal Future Journey
How to project your professional
career by asking participants to
map milestones and major
achievements for their future.

44. 1. Understanding relationships among elements in a category
2. Comparing activities to locations
3. Creating multiple layers of meaning to explore:
a. Likes/dislikes/feelings
b. Channel use
c. Purpose/role of mapped items
d. Priority of mapped items
Map
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

45. Social Media Map
Measuring the importance of
Social media tools, how each
engages the participant, the
purpose of each tool, and how
people control interactions among
them.

46. Business Origami
Modeling and understanding
complex services with no
diagramming skills.
Envision the story of how users
experience a service, making
emphasis on key touch points.

47. 1. Exploring important scenarios — Noticing emotions and
assumptions in different scenarios
2. Lessening pressure around sensitive topics
3. Gathering values, norms, rules, and native language
4. Exploring solution spaces
Play
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

48. Role Play
Measuring the importance of
Social media tools, how each
engages the participant, the
purpose of each tool, and how
people control interactions among
them.

49. Games
Participants were asked to act as
objects or persons related to a
service.
Spot opportunities to improve the
journey they go through when
interacting within a service chain.

50. ...you can also
create your own

51. Time to work!

52. Uncover possible new
products or services for
pet owners
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

53. The emotional relationship
between a pet owner and her
mascot
You will research...
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

54. I haz rezearch!
We are creating a blank
exercise that will be
completed by a user
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

55. EXERCISE # 1
Choose
Exercise Type
→ As a team, discuss what
information you would like to
get from your users
→ Review each of the exercises
from the list
→ Decide what kind of exercise
applies best for the given
scenario… you can customize
them!
10 MINUTES

56. What do you want
to know?

57. EXERCISE # 2
Prototype the
Exercise
→ For the sketch, use a whole
page per exercise.
→ Sketch one exercise for now
Make it quick, it’s just a draft! …
→ Avoid perfectionism
20 MINUTES

61. EXERCISE # 3
Test your
Exercise with
Real People!
→ Ask a user to complete your
exercise while you guide the
conversation.
→ Build rapport, make open
questions, always ask why… keep
digging
→ Take notes on how are
instructions interpreted. Is there
any confusion?
→ What follow-up questions
worked better?
20 MINUTES

62. I volunteer!

63. EXERCISE # 4
Iterate the
Exercise
→ List all possible fixes to eliminate
confusing instructions.
→ Adjust format if you didn’t like
the results you got.
→ Re-draw your sketch, re-write
the instructions if necessary to
add layers for more depth.
5 MINUTES

64. ● What exercise did you create?
● How would you apply this to your job?
● What was your Aha! Moment?
Show how good you did

65. GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP
What would be next?
● Refine your exercise
● Improve rapport skills
● Recruit 8-10 users and bring them over the table
● Interpret the results (Affinity Diagrams)

66. ● “It’s not the customer’s job to know what
they want” - Jobs
● Deeper emotions with hands-on exercises
● Customize your own methods
Key Takeaways
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP

67. Bella Martin &
Bruce Hanington
Liz Sanders &
Pieter Jan Stappers

68. Watch it on YouTube

69. March 2018
Design is all
about people!

70. “Design is all
about people.”
Thanks!March 2018
Misael Leon
Product Designer
mleon@nearsoft.com
misaello
misaelleon
Sandra Vazquez
Business Developer
svazquez@nearsoft.com
sandra_daniela
sandradanielav

71. Generative Research DIY
A GR Case Study: Life insurance for Millennials
List of UX Methodologies and Case Studies
Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design (Book by Liz Sanders)
Bringing Users into Your Process Through Participatory Design
From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches (Paper by Liz Sanders)
Liz Sanders - Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design
Liz Sanders on Participatory Design (video)
GENERATIVE RESEARCH WORKSHOP
Useful Links