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Motivation

One of my steady passions in life has been striving for an evermore athletic and healthy lifestyle. I find it fascinating how we make so many little decisions each and every day that together, compound to determine where our health and fitness stands. This project will focus on the physical activity aspect of health and fitness.

Problem space

Starting out this project, I was interested in understanding the role athletics play in an undergrad's lifestyle. From my (still frosted) window into the problem space, I found it particularly interesting observing how my peers coped with drastic changes in their lives such as moving to university, to various internships, and back again. I noticed changes in their athletic agenda, and with it, frustrations trying to find a balanced lifestyle; something I related strongly to in my own life. I set out to better understand the undergrad and intern’s athletic experience with the objective to find a specific problem space I could make a difference in.

Addressing cognitive bias

To begin my understanding of a new problem space, I find addressing bias immediately helps me get into a beginners mindset. King’s Speech is an activity I came up with to help me avoid confirmation and selection bias.

King's speech

Activity: In the constraints of this exercise, get in the mindset that you are an expert, your opinion is very important, everyone wants to hear what you have to say. Spend 5-10 min and write about the perspectives you hold and the unique experience you have had regarding the problem space you are exploring. Write your King’s speech.

Purpose: If you’re heavily ingrained in the problem space you're working on, it’s all too easy to have bias creep into your decisions. King’s speech allows you to get familiar with your perspectives and understand where your bias may lie. After completing this exercise, I find it easier to confront myself and make sure I’m making decisions based on information I’ve learned about my users, rather than my own experience. It’s also a great reminder to consider how other types of bias may influence my design process!

Research questions

With a firm grasp on my own perspectives, I turned to learning about how others experience this problem space. Below is a list of research questions I saw as being important to explore further. Not to be confused with interview questions, research questions are used to capture what you want to learn about but does not indicate how you are going to go about getting your answers.

Research methods

Each research question was then considered to determine the best method of further investigating them. Let’s look at a few examples:

This question is likely a well-researched area that has been explored using a scientific approach. Questions of this nature were clustered together to be investigated further using existing research.

In contrast to the previous example, this question is very specific to the problem space being investigated and requires a detailed understanding of the users mental model. Questions with these properties were clustered together to be further investigated through exploratory interviews. Interviews of this style allow for individualized prompts to gain a thorough understanding of each interviewees perspective.

Interview guide

Organizing and leading user interviews is an acquired skill, while on the surface it may seem simple, there’s a lot that goes into making an effective interview. My preparation started with turning research questions into interview questions. A large focus was placed on creating questions that would prompt conversations about each topic without leading the interviewee. The list of questions was then ordered to form an interview guide, follow up questions were created, and most importantly, I spent some time to ensure I truly understood what I wanted to learn about from each prompt.

Facilitation

In terms of interviewee interaction, from my first recruitment message all the way through the interview itself, I focused on two things, developing rapport and avoiding biasing the interviewee. It’s a tricky line to nail both, but through a lot of practice and self-reflection, I am proud of how my skills have developed in this area. After each session, I scored myself on how well I performed in 12 key areas identified by the Nielsen Norman Group’s article on user interviews.

To me, user research and prototype testing methods are some of the most interesting tools used in a typical design process. You get to uncover how other people with their own unique experiences and mental models experience something with a fresh mind; it rarely comes without surprises and new perspectives that help create a better solution.

Synthesis

In my first round of interviews, I completed 12 exploratory interviews with a diverse range of athletically involved undergrads. I then used a three stage approach to identify promising opportunities beginning with affinity mapping to cluster notes and identify trends. I then created ‘how might we’ statements based on each cluster to capture and consolidate the relevant problem spaces. Finally I used a problem identification framework as shown below to identify promising problem spaces that score highly in terms of importance of the problem to the given user group while receiving low satisfaction scores with current solutions.

One of the unexpected results from this exploratory research round was the popularity of climbing. Climbing stood out as by far the most frequently mentioned sport being brought up in eight of the twelve sessions and was commonly tried for the first time by participants during university. Interestingly, the majority of participants who discussed climbing indicated their indoor experience was highly enjoyable, however, the same could not be said about their outdoor experience. Indoor climbing was seen as an attractive experience given its ability to blend social interactions and problem solving with physical exercise. In contrast, researching, navigating, and sourcing up to date information for outdoor climbing crags was seen as being quite a frustrating experience and a large deterrent to new comers.

Results

To continue this project I used the resulting ‘how might we’ statements and supporting interview notes to pitch the problem space as a topic area for my degrees final design project. I formed a four person design team and together we spent eight consecutive months applying a user centred design approach to further explore and scope the problem space, eventually creating a function digital solution. We were honoured to received the “I-Beam Award” for best project in the class. A continuation of this case study will be coming fall 2021.