More Challenges in Design Research

This section presents challenges associated with identifying different user types in non-goal oriented activities, which lack clear procedures that cannot be broken down into tasks, and in which complex social networks are involved. Based on the observations from the three design case studies, this section will also discuss dynamic and permanent attributes that should be included in design research to help designers and developers portray their users.

8.3.1 Non-Goal Oriented Activities

One of the most challenging parts of design research is to understand non-goal oriented activities, such as casual activities, traditions, entertainment and social gatherings. In such activities, people are driven by complex motives (e.g. to maintain personal social relationships or to inherit family traditions) but lack specific goals to achieve. In other words, most task analysis techniques and rapid design research frameworks cannot uncover the meanings and reasons behinds actions, as well as the underlying purpose of the activity.

In addition, it is difficult to account for detailed and complex social interaction or collaborations within a community in short-term design research. People’s social behaviors are generally complex, subtle and situated. Our design cases have shown that traditional behavior analysis and pure observation cannot explain the reasons behind actions. In the study of teenagers’ social behavior, it was shown that the young generation’s social activities and considerations of making friends are extremely flexible and situated; they interact with each other within intricate communities and choose appropriate communication platforms based on the depth of the relationship.

Traditional research approaches in IT development and industrial design, which focus on a single application, product, context or specific users, cannot reflect the richness and complexity of real social contexts. For instance, in the case study of a Taiwanese tea ceremony, making tea itself is not the goal and purpose of the activity but rather the social gathering and transmission of cultural values. Therefore, it is crucial to extend the research to a larger scope, including its peripheral events, related participants, information flow and

relevant media usage, for understanding a non-goal oriented activity.

Based on knowing the different user types in the design cases, I suggest that researchers who wish to gain deep insights into social interactions use ethnographic approaches of long-term involvement and the multi-level social activity model in the early stage of a development process. A wider research scope can also make development teams aware of all different types of people involved in the activity, including consumers, direct end users, potential users and people who contact, interact or are affected by target audiences. Such an understanding can be of great benefit in design and development for social interaction and services.

8.3.2 Dynamic Demography

Based on the cases, it is noticed that there are two types of information that have not been highlighted in general user modeling, profiling or persona description, yet are important for identifying potential users and predicting their behaviors. The first type of information is dynamic attributes, such as age and IT consumption. The second type is permanent information, such as social values, norms, customs and appropriate behaviors.

The importance of the first type of information emerged from both the case studies of tea ceremonies and of teenagers’ social activities. As shown in Figure 20, tea ceremonies are a typical type of traditional social activities that enhance the sense of belonging of family members, which are passed along from one generation to another. However, from marketing and usage-centered viewpoints, the youth involved in the ceremony are neither consumers nor end users. Because of the different media usage, they generally get no information from tea producers, farmers or other sellers (which is mainly accessible from magazines, newspaper advertisement and yellow pages), and they cannot afford to have their own teaware. However, the custom is still inherited, which means that within the predictable future, this young generation will grow to become the target audience of the tea ceremony. In other words, if service designers provide the right information on the right platform, it may be possible to shorten the period of this cultural inheritance and bridge the gap of media usage among different generations.

In the case study of teenagers’ social activities, we found that although teenagers are willing to be active users of technology in their pursuit of new friends, their available modes of communication are often limited by their economic status. As teenagers generally have limited financial resources, most IT products and media producers are unwilling to develop services for them. However, the older teenagers will see great improvements in their personal

economy in only one or two years and their great interest and reliance on the Internet will make them the target audience of smart phones, tablet and other IT product in the near future.

This type of information, predicting future audiences, is basics in marketing, but it is often overlooked in design research.

To develop better communication and cross-platform services, user profiles applied in design processes should reflect how people’s IT product usage, interests and social behavior changes with demographic transitions. Therefore, I consider that design research needs to discover the dynamic attributes of potential users, such as predictable shifts in age, lifestyle, economic status and IT consumption. In addition, inherited customs and traditions within activities should be identified, since this can help designers target the next audience and invisible users within a greater population.

8.3.3 Motives, Attitudes and Socio-Cultural Background

More permanent information, including individuals’ attitudes and values, has been highlighted in some work of developing personas. However, as with above-mentioned problems of user modeling, higher-level socio-cultural information such as norms, interpersonal relationships and culture, are generally ignored in design research. All the three design cases have shown that this information is important for proposing and evaluating design solutions in communication, service and social media development.

In addition, according to the MLSAM and flow models of all the case studies, it is showed that participants in a certain activity can have very similar behaviors, but that their concerns, attitudes and motives may still differ greatly. In the sports watching case, the potential supporters come to watch the game because they consider it as a social gathering. In the case of teenagers’ social activities, although most users have similar behaviors on a certain platform, their abilities to account for and respond to each other’s actions and expectations toward social media are very different. Therefore, I argue that research methods such as task analysis, observation, online logs and behavior tracking are not sufficiently capable of identifying different types of users, and that design solutions will be restricted when treating all types of users in the same way.

On the other hand, it is noticed that in casual activities and communication, social norms and cultural traditions consistently affect people’s behaviors. For instance, teenagers’ friend-making process on the Internet still follows the cultural manners that apply in their daily life.

In the case study of tea ceremonies, some participants consider the ceremony to be part of

East Asian culture and feel responsible to maintain this tradition. In the case study of sports watching, people’s attitudes and motives of supporting a certain sport are highly influenced by the community, social economic status and popular culture.

Understanding of high-level information such as values, attitudes and socio-cultural background is easily taken for granted and therefore ignored in design research. Common design research methods and frameworks can reveal the usage context and the ways that people involved in a certain activity, but have difficulty extracting the meanings and values behind activities. The design case studies have shown that ethnographic approaches, interviews and grounded theory can help development teams gain deeper insights, but that these methods are also time consuming and may require highly experienced researchers.

However, the information discovered by these expensive research methods can give designers a more solid picture of their target audience, which is of great help when proposing, designing and evaluating concepts. The knowledge can also be reused in future development of new products or features and the initial research investment is therefore likely to pay off.

8.4 Summary

Traditional user modeling mainly focuses on human-computer interaction. Although the models reveal detailed information of the ways that people interact with systems, they are incapable of capturing many factors and contexts critical to design for social interaction. On the other hand, personas represent rich information of users’ life contexts and attitudes, and bring various benefits to design practices. However, there is little consensus on suitable methodology for how to develop reliable and representative persona. Both user modeling and personas narrow down their audience groups by focusing only on a small set of important activity contexts; user modeling only focuses on direct users of systems, and personas mainly represent target consumers, rather than describing the many participants involved in social activities.

Chapter 9

DISCUSSION

In the previous chapters, the three case studies have outlined current challenges in understanding users in social interaction, experience and service design practice, such as diverse user types, uncertain activity goals and complex social interactions. This chapter summarizes the benefits that can be gained by extending a design research scope in the early stage of service and product development.

According to what we learnt from the three design cases and the evaluation workshop, I consider that the proposed integrated research approach and the multi-level social activity can identify invisible and potential users in a larger-scale service design and help researchers, designers and other practitioners develop more representative and reliable personas. In addition, how MLSAM can complement other design methods to help development team communicate to each other, predict their future audiences and develop more adaptive service and systems in iterative design process will be listed.