 Quick check, what's 5 plus 3? Okay, what's 4 and 9? This is difficult, what's 4 and 9? People are weak. So, since we have only 30 minutes, I just checked with them. They said yes, we are going to switch off the projector. So, I shall speed up a bit. But if anybody wants to take something offline, move it happy after this. So, this is going to be an exploratory session on how we can do user research a little differently in our world. That's becoming more mobile, more connected, more and more bite-sized. So, this is going to be an exploratory session from my experiences from something that I've learnt, others are doing as well. And anybody knows what the sushi is doing there? Oh, he's killing me. The sushi is mobile. You can take it whenever you go. It's literally bite-sized. And if you look at how popular sushi bars are becoming all over the world, I thought that was a perfect visual representation of a connected world. So, that's the reason the sushi is there. Okay, so this is the topic. I'm sure everybody knows this was the topic for this year's UX India, which is driving value through customer experience. When I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was is a customer the same as the user. For whoever attended Prachi's session and the Q&A, this would be a repetition, that somebody asked if the customer and the user are the same, right? So, consider this example. I buy a gift for my friend, who's the customer, who's the user. I'm the customer, my friend is the user. I buy diapers for myself. Obviously, he's the user, right? And I'm the customer. So then, if we're talking of driving value, then value for whom? Is it value for the customer or is it value for the user? The reason I'm asking this is, I've seen a lot of people use customer and user interchangeably nowadays, right? And largely for convenience, because they use the two interchangeably. But I've found people at both ends of the spectrum. I've found, in my work experience, I've found people saying, oh, you know what? I've asked my customer. They've told me exactly what they want. Why the hell should I talk to my user? Right? And at the other end of the spectrum, I've found people who do lots of user research, make awesome products, which are, like, perfect for the user. The problem is they totally ignore the customer. So that's why I find a lot of well-designed products remaining unsold, because the customer's not taken care of. You might have designed a game which is awesome for my child. I have one-and-a-half-year-old son, okay? So if I just start giving him to any child examples, please bear with me. So if you make an awesome toy for my child, who knows the user, but the toy takes, like, three hours to set up, I don't want it, right? So that's why long explanation for a short answer. Love their users, but love their customers too, right? Value for both users as well as value for customers. It's a tightrope work and it's easy to stand here and say that, but it's really difficult when we start doing it. But I think as user researchers or as UX professionals, I think it's our job to find that sweet spot, right? Which is what is value for the customer and what is for the user and to find that sweet spot. That's our job. So for today's session, I'm going to talk about only users, but the same thing applies to the customers as well because I'm talking of user research and value for user, but the same thing applies to the customers as well. So if you look at the kind of things that we do in our job every day as UX professionals, as product owners, as entrepreneurs who own startups, you can pretty much put everything into four buckets, right? Either we are discovering what is value for our users, right? Finding out what is that need, what do they want, what do they really care for, what are their aspirations. After we discover that value, it's our job to communicate it back, right? You come back and you tell your team, you know, this is what I found on the field, right? That's the communicating part of it. Then you sit with them and together you create something. You create a product, you create a service, you create a company as well, right? So that's a creation part of it. And finally, you assess. You go back and check if what you've actually made is really of value to the user or the customer, right? So this is what I call the value wheel, just some clarity in my mind. So when I talk of... Okay, so if you look at the traditional divisions, right, of evaluated user research, don't think too much about it, but there is generative user research, there's evaluative user research. So this part of it is pretty much generative and this part of it is called as evaluative. Not too much to worry about. But when I talk of how user research can be changed, I'm going to talk of some major shifts which are happening in the world these days and I'm going to talk in terms of how we can bring about some change, how we can leverage those shifts which are happening in these four buckets. Okay, so far? Follow me, am I too fast when I'm speaking? Okay, good. Discovering value. How do we discover value? How do we do user research most of the times? Anybody? You go on site, okay. See the user in their own environment. See the user in their own environment which is what pretty much is happening here. Interviews? Talk to them about the daily lives, qualitative, quantitative. But if you look at how we're still doing user research, we're still doing large formats. You say, I have half an hour of your time. I've done that so many times. You have one hour of your time and you say, one hour, I'm not going to give you one hour. And they say, okay, fine, 15 minutes. And I try and hope that I can extend it. But I'm pretty much still doing large format interviews. But look at how people are shifting in terms of how they communicate. This is the major, first major shift that I've found. Anybody remembers this? Archie, Betty, Veronica, everybody's grown up on those. Remember, Betty would come back, Veronica would come back from a vacation, some exotic vacation and sit on the couch and chat for hours with Betty, right? That's how people were talking earlier. Our communication was long, but it was paced out, right? When I was in the hostel, I used to call my parents every three days because they were on the mobiles. There was landline and to go dial it. And that's how communication was. Versus, look at how it is right now. When I go shopping, if I see a nice dress, I try it on and click a picture, send it to my sister and say, what do you think? She says, great, bye. That's it. Done, right? So it's short, but it's always connected. When I go home, I try it again in central pictures and say, what do you think in the evening? Like, how does it look, right? So we are always connected, but we're doing short bursts of communication, right? The other shift that's happening is everyone's moving, everything's moving. I don't need to state this again. Everybody knows the word is on wheels, right? I've done usability tests for like, blogging platforms and all, right? Where you get people into the usability lab, give them a computer, they'll start a blog and say, how do you type a blog, publish a blog? Look at how people are writing right now. You start typing on your computer. You continue typing on your, maybe iPhone when you are in an office shuttle. And when you go home, take your iPad and post it, right? So there are three different devices, three different locations. So everything's moving, everyone's moving. That's the second shift. Now, how can we use this tool to change the way we do user research? To discover value, right? I think the mobile. This is a highly untapped area. Why can't the mobile be used as a tool, right? People take photographs. People take thousands of selfies. Why can't we use mobile phone to actually understand a little better about the environment? This is an example. I found somebody's done this. This was more for market research than user research. But what it does is it says, take a picture, you know, describe your mood, or what are you doing right now. So what they're doing is actually they're blending user research, keeping it short and crisp and blending it what people normally do, right? They're not asking somebody to come to a lab. But they say, you know what? You take tens of selfies. Why don't you just take a photo of what your house looks like and set it to me? And that's one way that somebody solved it. Here's an example. We were doing a diary study when I was working in my earlier company. You know what diary studies are? You give people a diary and we had given them an internet device and they had to every day make a note of what all they have done on that device. What we found is nobody writes anything and typically Indian habit, I'll say not even Indian, global habit of last minute preparations like how we do for exams. Just before we would go visiting them, they would quickly scribble something in the diary. So how we tried to overcome the problem is we would call them every day. Just a five minute call and say, hey, what are you doing? What did you do today? Did you use the device? What did you do? Can you just tell me? That five minute call was very low investment. I can talk to these guys for five minutes, tell them something. And that became a primary source of information. We knew whatever's in the diary is going to be some last minute cooked up story. But we gave them the diary nevertheless, but we relied more on these five minute calls. And you know how often, just before I got here, I was checking, I got a WhatsApp notification. I was checking whose sender message. Even if it's a forward message, we are addicted to it. So imagine if you use WhatsApp for running user studies. I mean, we just need to make that shift. It's possible, might be a little difficult to start with, but I think just moving from that mode of long format to short format. Yo, I don't know if you guys heard about Yo. There was that ridiculously useless, people thought that, you know, what is this? You can really send a Yo. But there are people who studied, for example, TV watching patterns. You want to understand how people watch TV in a day. If you tell them, every time you start watching TV, send me a Yo. Every time you stop watching TV, send me a Yo. And just by that simple act of sending a Yo, you can get a timeline of how people are actually watching TV. It's a simple tool. Oops, I'm back. Have you seen this? It's a small camera. It's a small camera called narrative clip. All it does, it takes, I think, two pictures per minute and then uploads them onto a cloud. Right? So you don't have to go clicking pictures. It takes pictures. So if you are doing like a day in a life study, I've done it with doctors and I've found it very difficult because you don't get access. If they are with a patient, you're not supposed to sit there and watch. Imagine if you give them this and say, all it's going to do is take pictures. You get to finally veto if you don't want a certain picture and we don't put that in. But at least it gives you a life log of what that person is experiencing in pictures. Right? So this is another great tool that it's a little expensive, I guess, but if your company can afford it, nothing like that. Okay, so that was using the mobile actively as a tool. The other way of doing this is to use mobile passively. Right? I was just having a conversation with somebody sometime back. They were talking about data mining and they were talking about how when you use a mobile phone, there's so much information, right? Location data, who you have talked to, where you have gone, what you have seen on your, what you have browsed, whether it's acceptable, non-acceptable, you know, whatever. But there's so much of data that's available. And so somebody was telling me this, the other day, saying that, you know, what's within Google, what's the most used feature of Google? So I thought so, but apparently among the Google engineers, it's Google logs, the logs that people have, right, of what site. So apparently they rely, and I don't know because this is an unverified story, but apparently they rely heavily on just looking at logs of what people have done to understand people, to find, we are creatures of habit, right? Everybody will have some or the other pattern. And if you see Google now, it says, oh, is this home? Can I tag this as home? Can I tag this as work? Essentially they're looking for patterns, right? So the other way to do this, a little advanced way maybe, is to use the mobile phone as a resource, right? The third shift that's happening is this whole 60, six degrees of separation, that's shrinking. Everybody's becoming more connected. I don't know if you can see, I found out I'm connected to Barack Obama through like three degrees of separation. I was like super great, right? I blocked out the guys in between, but yeah, I am apparently connected to him by like three degrees of separation. So that's shrinking, we are becoming a more connected world. There was a time when this whole man with a mission was like, I'm the sole hero, but now that's becoming groups with a purpose. Then meet up groups everywhere. So groups is becoming the unit of thinking. It's not individuals anymore, right? So again, I called it social butterfly effect, but what's happening is people are becoming more and more social and everybody's having these circles of influence which are expanding, colliding. So I meet somebody, I met like five years back at you and linked and through you I find somebody else and so on and so forth. So what's the effect this has? Groups shape identities very strongly, group shape values. So if we are considering, if I'm designing something for him, I can't consider him in isolation. I have to consider who are the people who influence him, who are the people he can influence, right? So that becomes important. You have to consider multiple perspectives. If he's trying out my service today, where his experience ends, maybe he's will begin because he'll come and tell him, then you know what dude, I tried this, this was super awesome, you've got to try it too. So that's why we have to consider groups. The other side of it is because there's so many groups around, we have ready communities of practice that we can tap into. I was doing a study for patient experience recently. All I had to do was go online. I found so many communities, patient opinion, you know, patient matters and healthcare entrepreneurs and there were so many people available just as groups and you don't have to go scouting like, you know, I want participants for my research. If you get into one of these groups, you'll find a group of people that you can tap into, right? Okay, so that pretty much covers this cover. So far everybody is with me. Okay, now I'll come to the fun part which is coming back in communicating. So you've found what is of value. Now I'm going to communicate that to your team. Okay, so what's the classic standards? Do we, how many of us still make reports for user research? Yeah, pretty much reports, no still, right? Okay, so this is one shift which is happening and again, I'm just stating things which are actually common sense but so we are moving from words to visuals. Look at how many things we do in our everyday life which are purely visual. Instagram, medium, nobody writes a blog spot anymore. Everybody's moved to medium, right? There's a nice fancy picture, a nice fancy title like how I taught my grandma marketing or why I stopped eating potatoes and beans and things like that. Five days to, you know, all of that interest, Facebook, YouTube. So we are becoming a more visual culture with literally thinking with our eyes, right? And again, we are wired to be visual beings. That's about fact. So I get it back to our team. We should make it visual. We should make it short, visual and interesting. I'll show some examples of how I've tried doing this at work and I mean, I've had some success. People are at least interested, you know, rather than saying that, oh, if you have a research report, you can read it later. So I've found that it actually works. So this is something that I did. So I did a research on SAP. So I work at SAP. I did a research on SAP's implementation experience. Huge beast. So I came back and I put together this board game. It had, you can't read it. It's too small, but it was like a board game with different parts of the implementation experience. I used construction as an analogy and explained it to them, right? The other thing I used was bit strips. Comics. Anybody is ready to read a three-page comic rather than reading a ten-page usability report, right? So I've used comics. Works well. This is another thing, the study that I was talking about, patient experience. What I've found is the most important thing out there was there were these movements, there were these little stories, right? Ultimately, user research is about stories. I mean, we get lost in this whole data and, you know, 10 out of 17 people sent this, but it's about stories. So I found these stories. I mean, you can go through them, but they were really powerful stories. Saying that, you know, I'm sitting at the doctor, he has a few minutes, I have many silly questions. How do I ask my questions, right? So all of this became the stories that I wanted to take back. You know what I did? I made a desktop calendar. I printed it out. I went to Printo and I printed it like a calendar. You had these quarter-day calendars, I don't know if you've seen. Every day you have a new quote, inspirational quote. I made this into a calendar. Each of them was color-coded, categorized, and it was like a desktop calendar. And I gave out this desktop calendar to my team. And I just leave it on the desk, right? And live it, read those stories, and you'll realize what actually are the opportunity areas. You don't have to do a major session for it. So these are some ways that I have tried making it visual. This is another way that I found somebody else had done, which was to actually put it up. This was a design agency. They went back and put up like a pop-up studio inside their client's office. And all their research finding, they made posters, they made it like an exhibition that everybody could come and watch. And it's super interesting. And the second thing I think is important here is we come back and we communicate our findings to our team. But we don't go back to those people and communicate it to them. You know, we have a very transactive model of this, right? Because somebody who recruits a user-search participant, do the research, compensate them, give them a little voucher, and say, thank you very much, and that's it, right? But what's happening is it's becoming more and more important to establish communities of practice. So if you find connections, go back to them, tell them, you know, this is what I found from this study. It's just going to keep them connected to you. Somebody was talking in the morning about having that relationship with users, right? So this is what it is. Then you go and communicate it back to them. And these dotted lines of feedback and influence, you're going to strengthen them and finally they'll come back to you, they'll feel more comfortable to you, and you can tap into that resource for getting more inputs, okay? We'll move on. We'll be good on time. What's happening here is where I say create. So what typically was the thing is user-research, many karthiya, it's your time to create, right? User-researcher gives inputs, designer creates, already developer creates. That was how it was thought to be, no longer. Now the model is everybody works together, so it's equally our responsibility, okay, sorry, equally our responsibility as well, to be a part of that messy creation process. So what have seen happening in creation is we're moving from co-located specialists. Earlier there was like a user-research team, a design team which was co-located, sitting together. Now it's moving to multidisciplinary teams. Obviously, everybody knows that. And they are spreading out. Everybody knows 37 signals, yeah? Spread out all over, right? They've written a book on how to actually manage companies which are located in different locations. And collaborative creation. Everybody knows open-ideo? Open-ideo, yeah? Where they post a challenge and then people post solutions, squaki, everybody knows squaki. Squaki is similar, right? You can post an idea, somebody builds up on it and then you post. So we are going towards, spread out, geographically spread out teams and we're going towards multidisciplinary teams. So we are moving from waterfalls to alterations. Again, abandon fact, right? Everybody's talking agile. Everybody's talking alterations. And the waterfall mode is pretty much disappearing. What that means for us is because we are doing lots of alterations, because we are spreading out geographically and because we are multidisciplinary teams who sometimes may seem like Greek-Latin to each other, right? What's happening is that sometimes the value might get lost. Sometimes people, as a team, in the whole thing about features and coordination and meetings and alterations, you might forget why you were doing this in the first place. Many times in the startup project, it takes three months, four months, and people are like, okay, how much? What do you want to do? I hope everybody understands Hindi. Sorry, I sort of go back into it. But sometimes people go like, oh, why did we start doing this in the first place? What were we trying to achieve? What was the need, right? So that's why it becomes more and more important for user researchers or UX professionals to hold on to that value. That's why our presence in that whole creation process is more and more important, right? It's coupled. I don't know. It's pixelated for some reason, but anyway, it doesn't matter. What I've found is doing posters. This is super, super valuable. I used a Wolverine poster here. It's dead simple, right? Okay, 10 minutes to go. I'm pretty much done. The Wolverine poster is, it's dead simple, right? And if you can actually make a poster for your product or your service and just pick it around so that everybody remembers what was a whole need, right? Even if it's a photograph, that kind of sums up what you're trying to do. If it tells you, you know, what your product should be for, who it should be for, that's enough. So I found posters to be super effective. Just at the end of it, before you start creation, simple poster, non-threatening, right? It looks completely non-threatening. Just put it up. I mean, people can remember this each time. The other thing I wish I had time to show this, but I don't. So I'll skip over, but I'm sure most of you have seen this. It's Twitter in plain English. Have you seen this? Anybody? Okay, just go look up on Vimeo or YouTube. It's called Twitter in plain English. It basically explains what Twitter does using just cutouts and plain English, right? So it doesn't talk about the product feature. It's just drawn out with paper and pen. And it's like a stock portion kind of a video which shows what Twitter is, right? So these kind of videos I found sometimes help. That you do a video and leave it. So even if people are sitting, some of the team is in China or team is in India or team is wherever, it's still easier. You can just send a video and say, you know, this is what we are trying to achieve. And that stays with people, right? So what about quirky? We are moving to collaborative creation. I was talking of open idea. So I found a really interesting example of how you can make this fun. Because if you're doing collaborative creation, right? I think it's very important to keep it fun for people. Otherwise, what's the fun? Why do people go to open idea? Because you see such inspiring ideas from everybody. You see that something is being done to your idea. So I found this nice example. Has anybody played this game? It's a game called I-Wire. Okay? It's actually, it looks like a game. But what you are actually doing is you're mapping real neurons. Okay? There are these neurons that they wanted to map. And it's huge, right? So what they decided to do is make a game out of it. When you actually pay it, it's a game for you. But what you're actually doing is mapping neurons, right? So it's collaborative value creation that is made completely fun, right? Try thinking of that. If you have a problem that needs a lot of people to work together, try and see if you can make it fun for them in some ways, right? So that's the create part of it. And the last part of it is assess. This is what assessment looks like, no? Usability testing. Get somebody into a lab. I've done usability testing for maps, a very popular map service on the mobile phone. Do you know how we did it? We called people into the lab, gave them a mobile phone, and made them nicely sit in a place and then try it out. Does it make sense? No. Why? Because when the guy is actually going to use maps, probably one hand is on the driving wheel, one hand is on the phone, and then he's trying to make his way through some crazy banger traffic, right? So it doesn't make sense to do assessment the traditional way, right? A lot of people doing remote user validation where your user can be across the world and you can do remote usability testing, helps because it extends your reach, right? You don't need to travel someplace. You can get wider users. But this is a shift. Almost everything that we do now, we're moving from computers to mobiles, right? I've still not found answers to these is how we see what they're seeing and doing. A large part of user research is not asking for observation. How do we observe what somebody is doing on a phone? It's difficult. It's easier on the computer, right? If I tell you to sit on the computer and observe from here, it's okay. But if you're doing on the phone and I come and see like this, nobody wants it. So I have not really found an answer to this because there's not yet a good, a very good way to do this. Largely, there is software like Dscout which people use, AskMDscout. There's some software that people use for doing mobile user research. But it's still self-reported. You know, you're asking people to report what they feel, what they see. And it's still not the best model, right? So that's... If you find something nice where people are actually doing this, please let me know. I'll be happy. The other shift that's happening is we are moving from usability to user experience. So how do you test your experience? User experience is that simple to test. How do you test your experience? It's spread across time. It's spread across people. It's spread across spaces. And there's so many moving parts that sometimes how do you test the whole experience, right? Another question where I still have not found convincing answers. If you found interesting models of somebody testing experience, please let me know. I just wanted to share this. This is something that I've found. Again, I'm quirky, is how people are doing crowd-sourcing, crowd-sourcing validation and assessment. So there was this thing, if I had an idea, you know, what will people say, you know, I don't want to really expose it or get feedback on it. But actually, a lot of people are now open. I think this is largely because of the entrepreneurship culture that's coming up. I don't know. All it's because of this whole open, connected thing that's happening. But people are actually crowd-sourcing things. So if you have a product or a service that you want to test, why not try and see if you can crowd-source it in something? Try and put feelers into a coffee area. You might get some responses, right? So, I mean, what I mean is people are directly doing this, right? You're hacking it. People are pretotyping things. People are... It's not a typo. It's not meant to be prototype. It's meant to be pretotype. There is this small booklet called Pretotyping Manifesto by this guy called Albert Savoya. Go read it. It's super interesting. It talks of how a pretotype and a prototype is slightly different, right? And how are the ways you can hack things, literally. So, do it the same way. That's a major change I see in companies. Big companies are also starting to think like entrepreneurs. And I'll give an example. So, this is a patient experience research that we were doing. So, we wanted to get stories from people. Remember the stories I showed you? They came after a lot, lot of tries. We tried everything. We tried leaving little things on people's desks in office. We made a Tumblr site. We made a Facebook site. We called people up. We tried our own networks just to get people's stories. So, the point is that we have to be flexible. It's not like earlier that you have a research plan and for six months you have a research budget which you still will need to have. But the point is that I think we need to be more flexible. Try a more mixed media approach because people are nowadays attention span is so less. So, we need to be constantly, you know, trying out new stuff. Iterative research approach. We iterate while we are building. Why not iterate when they are doing research? Right? Not like reaching different stages. But within the same stage also try and iterate your research methods. You might find something different. And before they shut it off I'll come to the last slide. Am I going back? Okay. Be creative and be exciting in how you approach this whole thing. And I think if you do that, if you make it fun, you'll discover everybody members. Just checking. Discover. Then, communicate. Then, create. And as I said, yay! Good. That is the thing. So, if you do that, be creative, be exciting and be able to do user research differently and please share it back whenever we meet or stay in touch. I'll be super happy to know. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, not a question but just to add on to your mobile part it actually a couple of parts launched in last month. Okay. Where it actually records the way it is, the person is having both the screen as well as the camera. You can choose front camera or the... Right. I'll drop a... Sure. So, by the way, that reminded me, IDEO published just four, five days back, I found it. IDEO, just go look up research in digital world, user research in digital world or design research in digital world. It's an article by IDEO and they talk of the different tools that you can actually use like Ethneo and all of these tools, right? So, they talk of the different tools that you can use for doing mobile research or remote user research and all of that. It's an IDEO article. If anybody is interested, look it up. A bunch of tools there. If you had that, there's a site called remoteresearch.com. Yeah. Type remoteresearch. Hope you'll have all the tools around. Correct. Remoteresearch.com is another site where you can find a whole bunch of tools that you can use for doing remote research and IDEO's article has some bunch of other interesting tools.