How MacGyver would do design research

How MacGyver would do design research – notes from Web 2.0 Expo
speaking: M. Jackson Wilkinson

Not hearing anything new yet but some good baseline reminders of things like..

· Use your feedback loop
· Talk to people that talk to customers
· Only research the things you need to know about
· Talk to fewer people

Now talking about ID and the power of sketching and paper prototypes.  Now discussing the benefit of quickly creating prototypes over investing time into high fidelity concepts – since early prototypes often have lots to iron out, better to keep it rough versus investing in deep development.  Easier to make quick changes and adapt the concept to the higher order user needs.  Quick, rough, assume you’re going to fail and don’t resist changes at the early design phase.  Again, nothing earth shattering, but very good reminders.

Alternative Designs
The speaker is talking about how it’s important to have alternative designs for your clients.  

Expertise
ID’s are poor at leveraging their expertise - power of the mullet.  MacGyver always knows what to do with his tools (whoa) – ID’s need to be confident like MacGyver.

Design Thinking
Trial and error, iterate, the best ways to get from point A to B – but not very efficient.  So you try shortcuts, like design theory – helps get closer tot he solution before you have to do the work – research from other disciplines – from cognitive psychology, social theory – find good solutions for your problem.  These are not wholesale solutions but can suggest how you solve your problem.  Social Identity Theory is how people perceive you – this becomes problematic when it comes to social networks.  The challenge is you want to project a different persona and social networks are dealing with this through groups.

Design Principles
Cognitive load – eg, showing a UI for renaming files which looks like SAP’s expense tool or better yet, the control panel from the Space Shuttle.  Users freak out because the cognitive load is so high.  Users panic when they see lots of UI that represents learning and ‘work.’  Now showing contrast with a Mac wizard that walks you through the process step by step.  Good for a novice user.  In short simplify.

Loss Aversion
People are more likely to take action when they have something to lose rather than something to gain.  Do the to learn versus do this or you’ll lose $100.  Users are more likely to take action when they think they’ll lose something.  You’re going to lose your work – don’t you want to sign up so you don’t lose?  Netvibes did this – save this page or you’ll lose your progress.

Design Patterns
Solutions many others have had to particular design problem on the past.  EG on Digg, vote to promote pattern – want users to surface things at the top, like reddit, digg, etc.  Auto complete is another one – see it on the Yahoo Design Library – type in the text field, provides drop down and provide suggestions tht make sense.  Warning – these are solutions to other problems and might not address some little difference you have with your design problem.

Patterns reinforced with solid research
Yahoo!
welie
(need other good examples – please comment!) 

Heuristics
Became unpopular because they’re not research based.  In short, here’s a list of things that you have collective wisdom around that are wrong with your soft/webware before you invest a ton in user research.  While not popular with hardcore researchers, an efficient way to start solving problems because sometimes the problems are obvious.

Analytics in the context of research
Good to point out where there might be a problem not so good at telling you what’s causing the problem.  He didn’t go deep here but did address via a question. 

Now you have the power of the mullet.

These are just my notes so please get the full preso here:

jackson@jounce.net
http://speakerrate.com/whafro
@whafro