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Product and service developers can easily be fooled into thinking all they need to focus on is the moment of engagement with their product. The design method “A Day in the Life” can help us put our potential audience (customer, client, or “user”) into a clearer perspective.

A Day in the Life is a simple activity that seeks to catalogue the activities and contexts that your audience might engage in within a typical day to help shed light on the life circumstance and situations that could influence your product.

Begin at the Beginning

Let’s illustrate this simple method with an example: education and training. When we design for education and training, the actual service might be a class, webinar, or workshop. However, the total experience of learning may involve much more than that.

Rather than assume your service starts at the moment people sit down (in person, at the computer etc..) go back to the start of their day.

Start with imagining a ‘user’ — be as specific as possible about this person with as much detail as you can provide that reflects a ‘typical’ or a particular (e.g., specific segment) service or product user.

Then ask: What happened the moment they woke up?

This question tells you a lot and invites other questions: Did they get a good sleep? What were the conditions that they slept in? What time did they wake up?

This matters because one of the assumptions behind your education and training service might be that people are attentive, able to listen and process the material, participate when necessary, and able to codify what’s learned into their brain and apply that later to whatever problem is at hand.

If you want your service to be useful, it needs to fit the circumstances of your user. If your participants didn’t sleep well, had to get up early to commute, are living in a state of fear or violence, or have no good place to sleep at all they are already facing some challenges before they start.

Continue the Story

The first question will lead you to a series of other questions that continue with: What happened next?

You continue this story as you progress through the day in the life of your participant up to and through the actual service event you’re involved in. After that? Continue the story through to the end of the day.

Along the way you will identify such things about your audience like:

Demographics
Social life and network
‘Touchpoints’ with other systems and services
Preferences
Social and psychological circumstances.

These are imaginations of sorts based on what you think is a ‘typical user’. To increase the likelihood of reflecting the experience of a diversity of users it is best to conduct some background research to ensure you are reflecting the true characteristics of your audience. This method also works for identifying qualities about non-typical or non-users to help you understand why they might not use or desire your product or service.

Putting it into Practice

This exercise is best done as a group and can be conducted within 2 hours comfortably with more time for more granular exploration. It is meant to be participatory, engaging and allow for some creative reflection.

Materials include:

Whiteboards or large flipchart paper
Markers
Sticky notes
Stickers (optional)

Over the course of a morning or afternoon, you can bring your team into a place of greater understanding of your users — current and potential — and help set the context for your service. If we consider our example of education and training, the lessons we learn from this might be that we break programming into different chunks, change the distribution model, provide additional or alternative means to access content, or perhaps follow-up with reminders and tips to aid memory or application.

This simple, engaging and powerful method will help you tell better stories about your product or service and those of the people you wish to influence and serve.

A Day in the Life is one of the methods that we teach as part of the Design Loft Experience pop-up held as part of the annual American Evaluation Association annual conference each year. It’s one of many methods we use to help our clients understand the bigger picture and gain new insights into their work. Want help implementing it? Contact us — this is what we do.

The Design Loft @ AEA 2017

The Design Loft returns to the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference on Friday, November 10th. The Design Loft will be held on the Mezzanine Level of the conference hotel (note: an earlier program had the Design Loft located on the Exhibition Level). There is a new session every hour.

The Design Loft was launched in 2016 in connection with the Presidential Theme of the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference that focused on evaluation + design. The one-day ‘pop-up conference’ was a huge hit with attendees looking to learn more about design and pick up a skill or two. The Design Loft format is simple: every hour on the hour from 9 am to 5 pm (the last session starts at 4 pm) a different design skill is profiled in a 45-minute, hands-on workshop that allows attendees to meet others, laugh, and gain a practical ‘tool’ for their evaluation practice.

Program

The Design Loft is an experimental space intended to provide conference attendees an opportunity to learn specific tools, techniques, and strategies from the field of design that may have application to evaluation practice.

The Design Loft was first launched in 2016 as an experimental ‘pop-up’ conference within the main annual convention as a means of providing hands-on, practical opportunities for evaluators to learn about design methods and tools that can benefit their work and advance innovation within the field. This year the focus of the Design Loft will be applied to the conference theme of Learning to Action.

Each session runs for about 45 minutes, which will allow attendees to take an ‘active learning break’ between sessions during the conference program. It’s a quick hit of excitement, activity, and learning for action.

AEA Conference Program Description: The Design Loft @ AEA

What is design all about and what can it offer evaluators? The Design Loft is an interactive space where attendees can come and experience design firsthand as part of a series of engaging, short workshops aimed at exposing evaluators to simple tools, techniques, and approaches to using design in practice.

Cameron Norman Ph.D. MDes CE, Principal of Cense Ltd., a Credentialed Evaluator, 20-year AEA member and a professional designer, will guide participants through an interactive, hands-on training experience in a small group format.

The Design Loft is a space for creative thinking, innovation, practical learning, and fun and whether Design is new to you or you wish to broaden your toolkit, time hanging out in the Loft will add much to your evaluation work and budding practice as a designer.

Principles

Design is a structured approach to learning about a topic, identifying needs and developing solutions and responses to problems through the active construction of models and prototypes. Design thinking is the way of approaching this creative process that can be employed by designers and non-designers alike using some of the following principles:

Embrace whimsy
Show don’t tell (make things visible and tangible)
Bias for action
Culture of prototyping
Time constraints
Fail fast to succeed sooner
Moving from fail-safe to safe-fail
Systems thinking

Schedule of Events

The Design Loft runs Friday, November 10, 2017.

9:00 am: User Personas: A persona is a tool in design that envisions a typical program user by constructing a profile of their behaviors, perspectives, and lifestyle relevant to the topic drawing on user research. These fictional characters are based on evidence and user-data collected by the design team and can help program designers and evaluators understand and anticipate the issues

10:00 am Attractor Mapping: Where is the action happening and how we can understand where to focus our energy and evaluations when looking at a complex system? Where might we focus our design and evaluation efforts when so much is going on? This simple, visual approach to system mapping will show us how.

11:00 am A Day in the Life: What does the typical user of a program go through in their day? How might the reality of a user’s day-to-day experience influence the design of a program and what might it mean for evaluators seeking to understand that experience and its relationship to program outcomes better? This session will show how a simple walk-through of a program using visual tools, acting out, and hypothesis generation might enable program planners, evaluators and collaborators to see new possibilities and insights.

12:00 pm Journey Mapping: This method helps tell the story of a program user’s experience with a program by tracking the encounters that a person might go through along the program. This allows evaluators and designers to analyze the various touch-point an individual might have with a program and create the right kind of program and data collection opportunity. This allows the evaluator to see where problems and opportunities might lay before implementing a program or looking retrospectively at an existing program.

1:00 pm 5 Whys: This simple set of questions gets us to tap into our inner 5-year old and inquire about not just why something is happening on the surface but toward a more deeper understanding of the cause of a problem. By getting closer to the root of an issue, we are better equipped to design programs that make transformational shifts, not cosmetic ones and evaluations that have the power to transform people and programs alike.

2:00 pm Role Playing: This physical form of problem exploration and prototyping literally has participants acting out specific actions or scenarios to gain insight into design opportunities, constraints, and challenges. This workshop will provide a perfect mid-afternoon break to get up and move and learn how a simple, imaginative approach to getting out of our head can yield insights and opportunities that will create programs that will resonate with our whole selves.

3:00 pm Paper Prototyping: This ultra-low tech model of prototyping uses simple tools to construct mock-ups of envisioned products allowing for a quick, low-cost way to see opportunities, challenges and needs without resorting to expensive, time-consuming and potentially harmful full-scale prototypes. Working from an example, participants aid design and assess potential strategic options in a quick, low-cost and effective manner.

4:00 pm Storyboarding: Movies and plays t and what is needed to make it come alive. We can take the same idea and apply that to evaluations. Visualizing an activity or program through simple drawings — no matter how simply done — can be an engaging way to gain insight into attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, and relationships between concepts, project components, and people. This technique will show you how a simple drawing can yield enormous information to guide a program design and the evaluation questions that follow from it.

Design for Living: A Day in the Life