Semantic Foundry, LLC

This morning, I was chatting with Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes (author of “Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation“) and I offered to contribute what I called a Mood Map to the Unify Documentation System. I wrote this up quickly (forgive the errors) to provide some insight into the UX activity and deliverable called a mood map, as well as place it in the context of Persona creation. I have noticed that many books and articles talk about the usefulness (or not) or personas and delve a bit into the actual production and design of the persona as well as defending it’s usage - but very few indeed explicitly define some of the activities that occur within the design research phase. It was either Spool or Cooper that talked about the real value of personas being the actual process of engaging with users and developing empathy towards their circumstances and experience interacting with a product.

The sole purpose of this exercise is to document and map the emotional states of a user so that it can guide the creation and communication of personas to stakeholders while also informing the design process itself. I’m not one for ux deliverables for their own sake, but this is one that carry’s a lot of weight and also goes a ways towards ‘traceability’ - that is, the ability to show all the real research that went into your personas. This is a rough draft that I hope to further edit and add additional resources - so I apologize for an errors which are surely Jared Spool’s fault. I will start with my brief overview of design research with an overview of mood maps, when to use them as well as when not to use them. I will not address interpretive, phenomenological, or constructivist paradigms and how those may shape our views on design research or the particular tactics used to uncover user emotive states or whether user’s engage in a construction of their reality because although it’s an interesting discussion, it’s beyond the scope of this blog post. So there.

Design Ethnography

Design Ethnography is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target market in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand in the context of a complex dynamic ecosystem that borders on chaos. In addition, ethnographic research seeks to reveal insights into how the target market shares information about about their problem space and potential solutions with their immediate social cohort.

Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable and locally specific. One primary difference between ethnography and other methods of user research is that ethnography assumes that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons they give for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, before we can assign to their actions and behaviors  interpretations drawn from our own experiences.

Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, in User Experience – a Research Agenda state that “It has become obvious that the design for user experience needs to aim to satisfy human needs beyond the merely instrumental, and to focus on how to create positive experiences rather than just prevent usability problems.” In other words, the aim of experience design is not only to serve our practical needs and to help us reach practical goals, but also to give meaning and to contribute to the quality of our life. Besides taking into account the human needs,  we must consider the affective and emotional aspects of the interaction, and the full nature of experience must be understood to capture the essence of user experience before we can undertake the task of designing a better, more emotionally positive experience.

Findings from a design ethnography project will influence both near-term problem setting and experience design activities, as well as longer-term interactive mediated ecosystem development development. During the study I seek to uncover pertinent insights about the target market’s experience enframing their goals, objectives, and perspectives as it directly relates to the client’s brand, and the role that these activities play with regards to interactions with their environment including context, family, friends, and community.

Design Research & Mood Maps

By Design Research, I specifically mean in-situ interviews and observation sessions which are conducted to probe deeply into the lives, habits, and emotions of target market consumers as it relates to a specific product or service. A cross-section of participants of a robust enough sample size must take part in the various activities to gain deeper understanding and to move beyond ‘design-by-anecdote,’ to elicit key joy and pain points that occur while these activities take place in context relative to the experience of the brand in solving real life problems.

While there are a number of tactical activities a design researcher can engage in including interviews, journals, usability testing, focus groups, and task analysis (Read Doc Baty’s article in UX Matters: “User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models“) – one that is particularly good at gaining insight into the emotive aspects of a user’s experience is the Mood Map. It is important to remember that Mood Maps are an intermediate deliverable meant to provide meaningful insight into the creation of Personas, not a final artifact – and you may choose to never show these to key stakeholders, but only include them in the appendix of a findings document after the research phase is done. Another important point is that Mood Maps are best used for larger, more complicated user engagements or scenarios, not small directed tasks - logging into an application would not be an appropriate use of Mood Maps.

Phases and Emotions

The diagram above describes the emotional ups and downs identified by study participants as part of the design exercise conducted during in-home visits with participants, although the location is less relevant than the importance of observing the participants in the most likely context in which they will engage in their experience with the brand’s product or service. During the exercise, participants are asked to name each of the phases they went through from framing their problem through exploration and finally (hopefully) problem solving process, and to then assign a corresponding emotion to each phase.

The diagram represents an average of participant responses. The exercise does tend to uncover some important variations based on a number of factors, including each participant’s individual personality, profile, and as well as emotional relationship with the brand – or a competitors. These variations are described in the “participants’ emotions” section for each phase which the researcher is encouraged to heavily document, photograph, as well as take notes.

Exploration is not a linear state, but rather a cycle of activities such as “imagine,” “research,” or “try-on,” each with a particular cognitive posture. It is important to reflect upon each of the phases of the user engagement and attempt to identify the dominant activity. People in the study instinctively begin to combat the uncertainty of indecision by considering the circumstances of their goal and limiting their options based on various contextual constraints - I believe someone came up with the term ‘satisficing‘ to describe this. If it is possible to have the participants verbalize their thought process, it will aid in providing richer understanding of their emotional reaction to a particular phase. These verbalizations should be captured and presented with mood maps made for each participant, and some of those quotes may end up in the personas as guiding insights for design consideration.

In presenting the findings, it is important to tell a complete narrative based on an aggregation of the findings before delving into particular anecdotes about any specific participant. An aggregate view uncovers both the joyous as well as the frustrating aspects of the interactions, which may uncover unknown or at the very least, un-discovered weaknesses in the user experience which can be marked for further exploration or deep dives.

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Resources

• Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
  By Mike Kuniavsky
• Design Research: Methods and Perspectives
  by Brenda Laurel (Editor), Peter Lunenfeld (Preface)
• Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research (Ethnographer’s Toolkit , Vol 1)
  by Margaret Diane LeCompte