DiCER: A distributed consumer experience research method for use in public spaces☆
Introduction
Understanding people, their behaviour and experience of products, systems and services is a key element of any design and business activity. Such knowledge can ensure the design of new and the improvement of existing technology-orientated experiences is appropriate for their intended audience. A designer is most effective when they have deep knowledge of the context where the end product or service is going to be used (Press and Cooper, 2003). The early stages of concept generation allow designers to exploit their intuitive knowledge and creative ability to generate a wide array of solutions. Later in the design process, more constraints on the physical, organisational and production criteria restrict the design ideas. The early phase of the process therefore allows the designer to be at their most divergent and innovative (Laurel, 2003). Linking together the outputs of consumer experience research with the earlier phases of the designers׳ activity has the most potential to influence concepts as they are developed (Frohlich and Prabhu, 2003).
However, there are two key challenges that need to be overcome. The first is how to acquire a clear consumer understanding through in-depth qualitative research without investing huge amounts of resources. The second challenge is how to communicate the results of such endeavours in a form that can be exploited by designers and other stakeholders. These challenges become even more pronounced when designing technology for use in public and shared urban environments, as the people research will need to be broad and holistic in nature and be conducted in “in the wild”, in real-life urban settings rather than in a traditional laboratory.
This paper presents a new method that enables quick and cost-effective qualitative user research. It uses and adapts techniques from the field of design ethnography to understand people׳s experiences when products and services are destined for use in a public setting. It is claimed the method makes it easier to do transdisciplinary research, showing how ethnographers, designers and non-experts from various backgrounds can work together in a transdisciplinary way, i.e. moving across and beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries (Nicolescu, 2010). Our paper describes how the DiCER method was developed, refined and then its effectiveness validated through studies in public space settings. The following section gives an overview of the method and its three phases: a training phase, a divergent phase and a convergent phase.
Section snippets
Method overview
The DIstributed Consumer Experience Research (DiCER) method has been developed to support organisations gain an understanding of the end-users of their products, systems and services, particularly when these need to be deployed in public spaces. The title begins with ‘Distributed’ as an important part of the method is the involvement of many non-specialist fieldworkers. The focus is on the ‘Consumer’ rather than ‘Customer’ as the method has been developed in the context of a
Design ethnography
Design ethnography involves the use of techniques from anthropology to provide businesses with deep knowledge about their consumers and their daily life to improve the probability of success for a new product or service (Salvador et al., 1999). Design ethnography is different from design research as a non-designer can apply it. Although design research is capable of providing insights to inform the designer׳s process, this frequently sits as part of the larger goal of producing a new product,
Broad experience research collaboration
The development of the divergent phase of the DiCER method was through two studies using large groups of people to make fieldwork observations. The studies apply an ethnographic observation method focussed on the topic of collaboration in public spaces. The first study, Urban Traces, applied an existing framework for making observations from the field of behaviour science in architecture. The second study created an entirely new framework for making observations and built upon lessons from the
Applying the DiCER method
This section validates the DiCER method by using a group of non-specialist employees distributed across a large organisation to fulfil parts of a fieldwork project. Additionally, it develops the training phase of the method to enable non-specialists to participate in fieldwork. The notion is that organisations can enhance their field research capacity for a minimal investment if they train and deploy existing staff to undertake short, focused periods of field observation.
Conclusions and future work
We have presented a new Distributed Consumer Experience Research Method (DiCER), which is based on design ethnography and is designed for applying within short time frames. An overview of the method was provided as was its aim to support the collaboration between ethnographers, designers and non-specialist fieldworkers within a large organisation. It is made up of three phases: a training phase, a divergent phase and a convergent phase. The training phase involves the recruitment and training
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by NCR and the Northern Research Partnership.
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This paper has been recommended for acceptance by E. Motta.