 All right. So for the next session, we're going to have a talk by Sarah Jane and Sarah that we're speaking about everyday objects and user research. And I'll just share that in a minute. If you all can see this screen, please let me know in chat. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Hi, my name is Sarah Jane Clark. I go by SJ and I'm a senior user experience researcher at Red Hat and I focus on developer products. And I'm Sarah. I'm also a senior user researcher at Red Hat. My focus is basically on rail and anything that's related to rail. All right. So you have gotten somehow access to a whole bunch of users, which is amazing. Now you've got some questions for them. You want to ask them about their motivations, how they use product, what they are doing with your particular project. But now what do you do with them? So you could try some of the old standard type things that you would do for research. You could do a usability test. You could try a survey, even a card sort if you're looking at navigation or that sort of thing. Maybe you have some sketches or a prototype. You kind of want to walk them through that stuff to get their ideas. And these are all great options. They're still, you know, the foundation of our toolbox. But those are all screen based options. What if you actually got them up and away from the screen? So the question really is how can we get the same quality of data that you would get from those kind of old standard type research methods, but do it in kind of a more visual and interactive and engaging way. All right. So let's take a look at the string board. This was a project that I put together for our company's annual conference. And what I had set out to do originally was to help us update our knowledge about our developer audience. So we wanted to update our persona set. We wanted to understand more about their motivations and their workflow, just kind of some foundational information. So to that end, I put together this survey. And we were going to have our attendees, our participants in this case, do this study on this tablet, an eight inch tablet. They would hold the tablet while in our booth and answer the questions on the form. And that's a perfectly good survey. It's still serviceable and it still accomplishes what I set out to do. But I thought, what if we could make this more engaging and more visual? What if I made it so that I could still engage with them and talk with them while they're answering these questions? So I thought, well, what if I brought this to life kind of in a 3D way? What if I could put this on a board that they would interact with physically? So this actually would help me address a couple of concerns I had. So first, it's difficult to interact with somebody while they're focusing on a screen or, you know, using a tablet it's a little creepy to kind of be hovering over them and, you know, hoping that you'll catch a glimpse of what their answer is so that you can engage them in deeper conversation. When I put this board together, as you can see in this picture here, it was so much easier to kind of step back, you know, not really be in the person's personal space, but still be able to strike up a conversation with them or, as you see with the person there on the right, he was able to listen in and still get some information from this conversation. So it was so much easier to kind of spark that up in the moment. So here's the board. What we did was we took all of those same survey questions and those are each of the columns and each roll had their own color of string so that what they would do is come along and choose their string that matched what their roll is and they would wrap it around each peg in each column that would correspond to the answers that they would provide in the survey. So we're getting the same information that we got from the survey, but it's much more visual and it builds up over time that we would have folks that would come back to our booth, you know, two or three times in the day and see how this data had changed and amassed over the day. They were interested in the story it was telling, so we were able to have conversations not only with the folks who responded, but with casual observers. So through this board, this photo was taken, it was about two and a half hours of users passing by here. In total, the three times that we used this board, we got over 250 data points. Now similar surveys that we did that we actually did on the tablets got fewer than five responses. So this was definitely much more engaging for our target audience, but also for folks who were kind of passing by and providing comments. So every night after we used this board, we would unravel the strings and enter that data right into this spreadsheet. So it made it really easy to, after we wrap up, keep track of the data that we had. So when we got back to the office on Monday morning, it was all there and ready to go and ready to be analyzed. Let's have a look at another example similar to string board. We call this activity the Lego board. Similar to the string board, Lego board, it's like multiple choice question, but fun and colorful. In this example, we wanted to understand customer's first impression and reaction to a visual design example. So we provided a list of positive and negative words and to choose the ones that best described the design. However, the one thing that we changed here was that instead of having them to select from a list of words in a certain way, we had them to select from Lego bricks. We used a different Lego color for each word and had our participant to choose from the Lego bricks. After selecting the colors, we asked our participant to put together something with the Lego's they chose and make something fun. This was a great opportunity for us to engage with them while they are playing with the Lego to better understand the why behind their selection. So for example, if they selected to choose flexible from the list, we had the opportunity to ask them why they thought the design is flexible and what makes it flexible to them. Every time we did this activity, we were able to collect more than 100 responses, which is a pretty high number for a survey question like this. Since we didn't have enough Lego bricks for all 100 something participants we had every day. At the end of every day, we had to take apart our pieces from the board to be ready for the next day. We took them apart and counted the number and honestly, what's more fun than playing with Lego's with your colleagues after a long conference day. So on the last day of the conference, we got together and built a city and called the pattern fly city because it was a pattern fly project. So this is the end outcome of our project. We wanted to understand what words come to people's mind when they look at their design. So we use those words as as bricks and put them together and we created something called pattern fly city. Here's another example of the same activity at DefConf Bernal last year. We were interested to learn which libraries and frameworks our front end developers use the most. So we use the same method to gather the data we were looking for, but in very engaging and fun way. If you have attended DefConf Bernal last year, you most probably have seen this activity. So is the data as good as regular methods? Well, to be honest with you, yes. So the data that we are gathering, we are collecting very high quality data because first of all, we are not just gathering some hard data, but at the same time we are gathering qualitative data because we are having the opportunity to engage with our customers and users to understand the why behind the selection and just better understand what they're doing and just learn more about them. But at the same time, these activities are simple to put together as SJ showed you, we use everyday material to put these activities together. They're engaging, they're enjoyable and they're great for building relationships with your users. As user researchers, not only we are responsible for creating and delivering sound and robust research insight to improve our product experiences for users, but also we have the responsibility to make the research participation experience enjoyable and pleasing for our users and the participants. So this is what makes user researchers different than data scientists. Our source of data is humans. So we need to be humanly with our data collection approaches whenever we have the opportunity. So to humanify research approaches, we would need to bring art, crafts, colors and games into the play, similar to the ones that we just discussed. Okay, so I bet now you are excited to try your own activity and we've got some helpful tips for you to get started with your own exercise. So first, like you would do with any good research study, you want to start with the question. That question is going to drive everything else that you do with this exercise. So you want to be pretty clear upfront what it is you want to learn. Secondly, simple but not necessarily easy is best for activities like this. So as you saw with the examples we gave, the answers were brief one or two words and that makes it a lot easier to pair up the answers with the items that the users will be working with. Third, you want to look around you for inspiration. Like Sarah said, are you into games? Are you into movies? Do you do arts and crafts? Do you crochet? Do you knit? I bet you've got some interesting things lying around that would help you put together a really cool exercise like this. Be creative. Fourth, consider your audience. So when we do these activities, they tend to be in kind of loud, you know, brightly lit spaces where there's a lot of people milling around. When you're putting together your exercise, think these things through. Think it through like what the sound is going to be like, is there going to be table space? You want to figure out these logistics ahead of time and that's going to help you make decisions about how you put your exercise together. Fifth, build a prototype and test it. When you've got somebody standing there with you, that is not when you want to be working out those issues that you have with your board. So, you know, take the time to put together a sample. It doesn't have to be your final item if it is, that's great. But test out these things, get your friends to participate and work out those issues. Six, iterate. It's rare that you're going to get it right on the first attempt. We certainly didn't in both of our activities. This is your chance to refine and improve on what you discovered while you were testing out your prototype. You want to keep refining it until it's just right. A good example is with my string board, after a participant would answer all of the questions, sometimes there'd be these really long lengths of string left behind and they'd be laying on the ground and that's kind of a tripping hazard in the busy area. So, we went back to the drawing board, literally, and we created a way for them to tie off the remainder of the string so it wasn't draping on the floor. That's the kind of iteration that you need for your projects. I hope these tips get you excited to try your own exercise. We look forward to seeing what you come up with. Please get in contact with us at the information we've listed here. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, Jane and Sarah. That was a really nice talk and I hope we all get to try some of the tips that you gave us. Sorry, you had an interesting question and I don't know if anyone had a response to that on thoughts of how to adapt these activities for virtual groups. Folks, if you have ideas, feel free to drop them in the chat. But for now, I guess we'll head over to the breakout room. Thank you.