An Integrated Design Research Approach

Most of the methods, frameworks and models in user experience and service design were developed to support rapid design in IT development and to help development teams generate, convey and even evaluate design concepts. As mentioned in Section 5.2, these methods focus on solving domain-specific problems and on supporting and designing for work-related tasks.

They are not sufficient to account for complex motives and reasons behind social activities and to help researchers understand how people’s behaviors and attitudes are influenced by social trends and cultural backgrounds. For user experience, large-scale service, complex social media and adaptive system development, I argue that it is crucial to combine well-accepted design research frameworks with the Multi-Level Social Activity Model and other qualitative approaches, to gain deeper insights of larger contexts and usage situations.

Therefore, an integrated process is proposed as follows:

Focus on a Certain Activity

The first stage is to understand the related micro-objective phenomena of studied social activities. As a pilot study, researchers can choose a representative activity, and apply common context-, user- or usage-centered research methods, such as contextual inquiry and activity theory, to capture events in great detail. In this stage, people who actually participated in the activity, objects, media, environmental circumstances and interactions are identified.

Extend a Contextual Scope

The second stage focuses on understanding the macro-objective phenomena, such as structure, cooperation and organization. The goal of this stage is to identify the flow of information and find the social network that is related to the activity in the pilot study. Through an iterative process, researchers can identify how both central and peripheral events, facts, and people are connected with each other and associated with the main activity. To avoid missing important details, I suggest applying traditional ethnographic approaches, such as interviews, shadowing, behavior tracing and self-documents in this stage. For social interaction and cross-cultural design, it is also a stage to observe people’s social behavior patterns, norms and related cultural features.

Recognize all Participants

In this stage, people’s goals, roles, interests and participation in the target activity should be clarified. This information can help researchers to further identify different participant types and identify potential users (the details will be presented in chapter 8). In this stage, it is recommended to conduct extended contextual inquiries, quick surveys and interviews. Graphs such as the contextual design flow model, are very useful to represent information flow, related participants and their behaviors.

Select and Focus

A workshop or a focus group in this stage can help development teams decide which types of participants should be considered as the target audience and to set clear priorities for design development. Once the user types are selected, traditional in-depth interviews and the multi-level social activity model (detailed in 6.3) can be used to capture deeper insights, including their expectations, motives and other socio-cultural concerns. In this stage, the detailed information in micro-subjective and macro-subjective levels should be identified. In addition, the multi-level social activity model can also help researchers understand the influences among different levels.

Portray Users

Several types of information revealed from the above-mentioned four stages need to be highlighted while portraying users. This information not only makes portraits serve the same purpose as user models and personas, but also make them include both macro- and micro- level socio-cultural information which can be reused in concept development and evaluation phases:

• Dynamic and micro-level demographic information: A portrait (it can be presented as a model or a document) should contain basic demographic information, such as age, gender, interests and income, which can represent a certain type of group and outline the user’s image. However, different from the normal user profiling, I recommend that researchers emphasize information that help predict how attitudes and behaviors will change with shifts in the users’ demographic data, such as the changing of IT consumption associated with increased income that follows naturally with increased age.

• Permanent and macro-level demographic information: The second type of information is about higher-level concerns, including users’ attitudes, motives, beliefs and their socio-cultural background. This information is permanent and can enrich the design solutions and can help evaluate designs in different phases of design cycles and in different products development projects.

• Roles and interactions within networks: The information about the user’s role, interactions, responsibility and purpose within the activity should be given. If there is a complex community and social network involved in the activities, both relationship and behavior patterns should be demonstrated.

Apply User Portraits in Iterative Design Cycles

User portraits can provide all members of a development team a thorough picture of different user types, their diverse perspectives and behaviors. Due to the information includes both high-level socio-cultural concerns and concrete interaction details, the portraits can help development teams generate more thoughtful ideas, brainstorm solutions and make better design decisions. In the following phases of presenting design concepts, including prototyping, developing scenarios and storyboard, user portraits serves as personas, reflecting real users’

lifestyles and usage situations. They also help engineers and developers consider most likely use cases and prioritize important features, and reduce the complexity while supporting cross-platform interactions and adaptive systems. In the end, portraits can be used to plan rapid user testing and design evaluation.

To support the argument that design for social purpose needs both macro- and micro-perspective and understanding of social phenomena and to develop a necessary tool for the proposed integrated approach, a field study looking at traditional social activities in East Asia was conducted using multiple user experience research methods, including practical observations and in-depth interviews by undertaking contextual design methodology and

grounded theory analysis. Through the expensive and iterative ethnographic approach with long-term involvement, the abundant cultural features involving and influencing people’s social lives are revealed in the case study, which also reflects and matches Ritzer’s four types of social phenomena.

Comparing the contents of contextual design work models and thick description (Geertz, 1973; Myers, 2000), what type of information is not covered and highlighted in current design frameworks will be discussed, and a design research tool, multi-level social activity model, is developed to help researchers and designers collect and present this information. In the summary of this chapter, the potentiality to use this model to complement the other research methods for social interaction design will be presented.