In previous videos, we looked at how observation is part of the interview process for user needs assessment. In particular, in the interview protocol, we talked about what kinds of questions and tasks you should pose in the observation itself. Particularly, we talked about the think-aloud protocol, where you ask the participant to talk about what they're actually doing and thinking as they go through a task, and we also talked about the different kinds of observation questions that you'll want to ask. Now, that might mean that you're ready to do the observation. But actually, even before we get into our observations of the tasks, I want to suggest that observation actually starts even before the interview itself. So for example, if you're going to interview somebody about their experience at the fruit section of the grocery store, you want to make sure that you understand what the grocery store layout overall looks like and how the person seems to fit in. Or if you're looking at a situation where people are trying out different products online that people might be using at the office, you want to consider the office environment as well. So for example, here are four different images of people's offices, and you can see how they're very different and what they tell you a little bit about what kind of culture the office has, and how that might impact your user needs assessment. So, here's one image. You can see in this office that is very clutter-free. The interesting thing to note is that there seems to be two chairs arranged right in front of the person's desk, which suggests that a lot of this person's work involves interacting with clients or customers. So, that's something that you'd want to understand in the user needs assessment. Here's another office. This one is not quite as clutter-free as the previous one, but they do seem to care about their overall visual look. There are posters that seem to be well aligned on the wall. The other thing to notice about this particular office is that people work very close to each other in not quite a cubical situation, but where four people seem to be working in close proximity. That immediately tells you for example that designs that for example might make a lot of sound or feedback that requires audio might be something that you will want to consider very seriously before providing it. Let me ask you to think about what's actually taking place in this office? So, you probably notice right away that there are three laptops here. I'm not really sure how this person uses the three laptops. But if I were interviewing them, I'd be very curious to see how they go back and forth between the three laptops and whether they make use of all three equally, or whether they stick primarily to one, as that could really influence how you think about product design. Then finally, here's an interesting office. You can see it's full of clutter. There's a lot of mess. It's not even clear how this person gets any kind of work done. But presumably they do, and understanding how they do it and what they really need to get their work done is something that will be important to understand in any kind of user needs assessment. So, those are the kinds of things that you'd want to understand even before you begin the observation process itself, the formal observation process. Now, observation will typically look a little bit more like this. Where you're looking over the shoulder of somebody as they use a product or a service, and you'll be asking them to go along with what again we call the think-aloud protocol, where you ask people to actually perform relevant tasks and then tell you what they're doing and thinking as they go about working those tasks. Now, this is actually somewhat awkward at first and people may not be used to it. Some people are actually very good at it and almost instinctively know what to do. Other people to take a little bit more prompting. One of the things that you'll want to do for the latter category of interview participant is to encourage them to talk aloud by asking them very brief questions, so that their answers will be the kind of things that they would say in a think-aloud protocol. So, you might ask them, ''What are you doing now?'' Or ''What do you think about when you do that?'' These are the kinds of questions that if you ask frequently and often at the beginning, over time the interview participant will get used to it and they'll start volunteering information as they go along. The other thing to note about observation is that even if you do record them, you're not going to catch a lot of the interesting details. So, you'll definitely want to take good notes. The other thing to think about is what kind of things to pay attention to. Personally, I feel that in any kind of observation contexts for user needs assessment, what you're most looking for are the unexpected things that you would not normally expect people to do when they're using a given product or service. So for example, you'll want to look for situations in which there are pauses, maybe the person is confused, or maybe they're thinking about something, maybe they're stuck. Another thing is to look at missteps or potential detours that people might be taking. Sometimes, those detours will be intentional. So for example, you might imagine somebody going through the Amazon checkout process, where when it gets to a point where they enter potentially a promotion code, a lot of people know that these promotion codes exist online somewhere else. So, they'll open up another browser window, search online for these promo codes, and then go back to the main Amazon website. All of these are situations where the user is doing something that's a little bit unexpected for the actual product designer or the service designer. So, you definitely want to pay attention because these are the places where the user needs really emerge. Finally, you want to make sure that you are asking questions throughout the process especially if you don't understand why somebody is doing something. So, if they seem to take a pause and hesitate before moving on, you might want to ask all right, ''What are you thinking right now?'' ''Why is it that you are hesitating?'' ''Or why are you posing?'' These are good questions to ask so that you understand exactly what it is that the person is thinking. Otherwise, observations are very similar to interviews, and the same kind of tips that you would follow in an interview still apply. You want to make sure that you maintain a conversational tone, keep the interview participant at ease. You also want to make sure that for yourself, you're keeping the overarching question in mind. Because in the end, the goal of the observation is also to answer all parts of the overarching question. If you can, you want to maintain a certain kind of curious attitude. Because in the end, the more curious you are about the situation, the more you will learn. And again, just like with interviews, practicing the observation process itself is really really important. In this course, we ask you to observe at least two different interview participants. But in real life, if you're doing this over and over again, you'll definitely want to practice as much times as you can so that you can get a hang of this the way it feels to actually observe people to put interview participants at ease during the observation process and so on. Finally, I refer you to the module handouts and the suggested readings in there because they also give you advice on how to conduct a good observation. Coming up, we'll be talking about how to extract the data from the interviews and from the observation itself.
