Cense

Innovation to Impact

Activity Analysis

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This simple technique is among the most powerful at eliciting a lot of information. When we look at an existing service, it may be easy to describe what people do to deliver, manage, and receive the service in simple terms. For example, an exchange between a bank teller and a client might be described as simply as a person walking up to a desk, asking for money, inserting their bank card, receiving money from the teller, and leaving.

An Activity Analysis would break this down even further. It would involve tracking the experience of the client. It would denote what the client did from the moment she entered the bank, what she saw, what she smelled or experienced, her feelings or thoughts, and the steps she took toward the desk.

You might ask how long she took, whether she stopped en route to the desk, knew where it was (did she ask for directions?) or did she wait in line and for how long.

We can also track what the teller was doing up to and including the moment of engagement with the client. What tasks was she doing? Where was her focus? What is she thinking or feeling?

This is a micro-method version of A Day in the Life, which is another method that helps us understand what our service clients do and use.

How to do it

Activity Analysis can be done as a group, facilitated by a leader to help organize and manage the activity. It’s a great way to get people talking about all that is going on with the actors, the environment, and the tasks. By opening up the discussion and walking through each step in the journey through the service with each actor, everything that shapes the environmental conditions, and the tasks that are performed, you’ll reveal an enormous amount of data about what actually transpires with even the simplest transaction.

This can be used to seed further questions like:

  • What infrastructure is needed to support the interaction?
  • What would be ideal?
  • How might this interaction look different?
  • What other variables could affect the journey and the outcome?
  • What could be done or introduced to make this better?

Activity analysis is something that can be done in small groups over the course of 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the complexity of the task and the amount of knowledge the participants have of the task or activity.

This simple analysis can reveal information about flows, resources, outcomes, and processes that are in place to support your service and help you see what’s not only in place, but what is possible, too.

This can be a great way to bring people together as well as lead your service design and evaluation efforts. If you want to implement this approach in your organization and need help, reach out to us. We’d welcome hearing from you.

The Personal Inventory Method

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What’s important to you? It might sound simple, but when we engage in service design the way we ask that question will shape the answers we get.

Keeping with a design-inspired ethos of ‘show, don’t tell’ the Personal Inventory method is a simple means to answer that question of importance for people.

The method is simple, flexible, and can be used in physical, digital, or hybrid contexts so it’s suited to a variety of situations where we might seek to understand the values and beliefs of an audience or particular service user. The Personal Inventory method is a means for participants to gather and catalogue artifacts and evidence of their activities that help answer the question they are posted about what is important to them in a particular context.

Setting Up

The Personal Inventory is shaped around a specific question tied to importance and value within a context. While it can be helpful to ask the question generally, most often we want to focus attention on a particular topic. For example, if we are seeking to design a system that supports patients in navigating their healthcare, we might ask a question: What is important to you about your healthcare experience? Or, What is important to you when being cared for?

The next step is to provide a context for data gathering and presentation. For those who are using digital tools, it might be worth using a platform that is easy to navigate such as a Pinterest board, a shared Google Photos or Flickr folder, or a more sophisticated, but highly modifiable tool like Milannote. The tool should be something that your participants feel comfortable with and this might require some initial training and support.

For using a physical media, a simple scrapbook or posterboard will do.

Gathering, Sharing, and Learning

Provide a timeline for the project that is reasonable and have individuals capture artifacts that represent or illustrate what is important to them. This might include original photos or videos, representative images from the Internet or magazines, even sound recordings. For physical-based projects, this could also including bringing in physical items (or photos of them).

The guidance for the participants is recommended to be light so that individuals aren’t too directed toward a particular ‘idea’ and influenced to give what they think the researcher wants.

Once gathered, the process of ‘show and tell’ can be illuminating for everyone involved. This can be done as part of an individual interview/conversation or as part of a group (with permission from all participants) to allow everyone to speak to what they are sharing. Sometimes items might have a clear explicit meaning and an implicit meaning. The design team has an opportunity to converse with participants and ask further questions to help understand values, behaviours, and memories.

Outcomes

The Personal Inventory method is a creative, visual means to engage participants in research and elicit knowledge about values-in-practice. The opportunities to inquire about things in context and in relation to the problem domain that we are design for is high and it allows individuals to speak to their experience freely in a non-technical way. This method works well for people of various literacy levels and means and can produce insights into what both current designs do (and don’t) and what future designs might consider.

This is a simple method to use. If you want or need help designing your project and using this, reach out and contact us. This is what we do.

Design for Living: A Day in the Life

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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.

Using Theories for Change

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The concept of Theory of Change is meant to provide program planners and evaluators with guidance on how to make sense of the mechanisms that guide how something transforms. Theory of Change as a technique is usually visual, participatory and consultative in nature, and is something that is developed alongside the program itself. What is given less attention are the change theories that underpin a Theory of Change.

Confused? You’re not alone.

Clarifying this is critical if your Theory of Change is to have any meaning.

Change Theories & Theory of Change

Change theories are based (largely) on psychological and sociological evidence applied to human behaviour at different levels. These levels include:

  • Individuals
  • Groups (e.g., teams, families)
  • Organizations
  • Communities
  • Societies & Systems

Some change theories will apply at all of these levels, while some are designed more specifically for a specific level. For example, Kotter’s 8-step model for leading change is primarily an organizational change theory.

Change theories are meant to describe what is to change and explain how change is to come about. These serve as the bedrock for what a Theory of Change is meant to convey. A Theory of Change links the structures and resources tied to a specific program, unit, or process with various change theories to explain why it should facilitate transformation.

Design Considerations

While we might have a viable change theory, we might not have a strong design. We often see organizations that seek to make changes that their programs or policies were not designed to accomplish. For example, cognitive rational change theories are built upon the basic assumption that knowledge informs attitudes and beliefs which influence behaviour.

If your program or service doesn’t have a design that facilitates information accessibility that allows your end user (those who are the focus of your service) to understand and use that information, it’s unlikely we will see change. Just-in-time knowledge delivery (e.g., doing a Google search) implies that people have the means (e.g., tools and technology), the literacy, the skills, and the opportunity to access and use that knowledge, otherwise it’s not likely to facilitate change.

Being able to locate a family doctor isn’t useful if you can only do it at a time and place when such a professional isn’t needed.

Theories of Change can help us plan our programs and service offerings and plot the points of impact, but without good change theories and design considerations it’s quite possible we won’t achieve what we set out to do.

Want to learn more about how to develop Theories of Change and what an understanding of social and behavioural science and design can do to help you learn and create impactful programs? Contact us. We’d love to connect.

Visual Thinking

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Service and product design involves creating something, envisioning it’s use, consideration of its effects, and hopefully seeing it achieve a goal. When we are creating or planning our project we need to consider all of that on top of the many ideas we have about what that product or service ought to involve. That is a lot to hold in our heads at one time.

This is why designers often rely on visual thinking and communication to help illustrate these ideas as systems. The benefits of this approach are many and include:

  • Providing a way to communicate your thoughts in multiple dimensions. Time, space, sequence, and effects are all different considerations for service design and visualizing that allows us to see these all in one space. Our language is linear, visualizing allows for linear and non-linear effects.
  • It creates a space for everyone to participate. Whether you are a skilled visual communicator or someone who hasn’t drawn anything by hand in 20 years, nearly everyone can draw. Visual thinking tools can provide a means to literally get people working on the same page. Simple methods like the Sketch Map are easy to employ and get everyone sharing ideas together.
  • Visual language – such as that illustrated by XPlane in their useful guide to visual thinking transcends spoken words and allows us to communicate even when our shared spoken language isn’t strong.
  • Visual thinking allows us to use metaphors, express complex emotions, and connect physical and emotional things together during a service journey in a way that is difficult to convey through oral or written language.
  • Visuals provide an artifact that can be interrogated, explored, and reviewed from many different perspectives allowing people to point to objects, relationships, and structures and ask about their purpose, illustration, and meaning without requiring much technical understanding of the problem-domain (allowing outside and alternative perspectives to meaningfully contribute).
  • It also provides a means to generate a shared understanding of the system boundaries, components, and purposes that guide your development of the service. It gets people on the same page metaphorically and literally.

Visual communicator Angelika Skotnicka provides a strong case for why we want to consider visual thinking and how it is done from the perspective of graphic recording.

Consider ways to bring in visual thinking to your project planning, service design, evaluation, and strategy development. It is low-risk, high-reward and is an engaging, low-cost, and often enjoyable way to generate enormous insight quickly and effectively.

Try it Out: A Tool

One of the best, low-friction tools to help you get your teams up and running is Milanote, which can allow you to brainstorm, plan, and design strategies using a web-based interface that allows you and your team to see your ideas on a canvas that can be edited, shared or adapted from a template.

Using tools like this can be a great way to practice visual thinking and build some of that ‘design muscle’ that we all have, but might not realize it.

Want to learn more about how to apply visual thinking to your work? Contact us and we can help you bring your ideas to light visually and more.