Adaptive Path Blog

Jan Chipchase, Insight and Innovation Studio, Nokia

“A Path, Adapted”

A lot of what we do at Nokia is about mobile phones but we’re really interested in everything.

His team’s challenge: capturing the sum of all human experiences. But we recognize this is totally unobtainable.

Begins with simple questions: who are you and how can you prove it? what do you carry where and why? how do illiterate people manage their contact information?

Typical projects: scoping studies (carrying behaviors, identity, way finding, etc.) and targeted at a particular technology or service (e.g. mobile tv early adopters in South Korea).

Illiteracy Project
One month to understand what it would take to design a phone for illiterate people. Turned into four years of research that is ongoing. New products are now based on this research.

It’s relatively easy to get people engaged in this kind of research.

What do billionaires and illiterate people have in common? Delegating the tricky part of tasks to someone else. Which leads you to ask: what can technology take on? What can you delegate to technology?

Everything is about exploring what is feasible.

The Future of Urban Spaces Project
Travel to a place, spend a couple weeks there, see what can be discovered about a culture in a few weeks. Totally reliant on talented local people.

How do you motivate strangers? You have to trust them to help you and that the data they give you is solid.

Contextual exploration. Go to where people do what they do. The richest context.

Wallet Mapping: take everything out of your bag and describe it. Question why people carry what they do.

Bring experiences back to the people at Nokia. Day in the life. Look at all the different things you in a day. What is normal for you is exotic for others.

Participatory design. Use design as a way to get people to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Always looking for things to give us cultural bearings. Signage is great for this. What do you need to articulate in a service? Searching for subtle cultural differences that may or may not make a difference in products or services.

Does it matter if a service or product is trusted?

Look at the essences. Why is something the way it is?

Underlying motivations for why we do things can be very similar even if the surface expression of that can be widely varied.

The value of things may not be in actually using them, but in simply carrying them.

When they leave a destination, they like to have everything wrapped up and cataloged and annotated. ~18,000 photos in a several week study.

Credibility: why would someone believe us and not someone else? The more people hear about the work you do from outside the company, the more credible they seem.

Tour Bus Ethnography
What can you really learn in a few weeks? How long is long enough?

The way around this is to partner with people who do know that culture: smart local people

You learn a lot in just the first few days, but you can’t know when to stop before you begin.

When we’re interacting with people, increasingly people are starting to document us. It really changes the way you work and how you think about how you work.

The speed of which small objects speed around the planet is incredible. All the stuff you think is cutting edge today will be commonplace in a few years all over the globe.

Three Things That Work
Make your colleagues smarter. What can I bring of my work into their world?

Know who you are. What is it that you are interested–and not interested–in? What are the boundaries of your research? What is off-limits? Utilize the resources at your disposal–push the limits of who people are. Don’t do things by the book; do the things that need to get done.

Let go. What are the things we can do to let people give up their data? Put the participants in control of the data gathering process. Let them remove the data they don’t like.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 7:06 am and is filed under Conference Commentary, The Big Picture, User Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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