Effective Data Collection Techniques for Design Research
Types of data to collect:
1) Data about potential users profile:
– demographic (age, gender, income, family size, education…)
– geographic
– psychographic
– behavioral
2) Data for validating our problem statement draft and our hypothesis about prob
3) Data opinions about existing alternatives and expected solution
4) Data for validating our design challenge draft and our hypothesis about our design challenge.
WHAT KIND OF NEEDS COULD DECISION OF A NEW SERVICE ADDRESS
– social impact
– life changing
– emotional
– functional
– address personas instead of users, collect emotions, desires, thoughts, observe customers
How can collect data from consumers:
1. Secondary data: DATA ALREADY AVAILABLE data collected from available sources, rather than own researcher, cheaper, want to find out before what is already known before own investigation: primary data and research.
a) Published second data: literature review
b) Unpublished sec data: in-house company survey
c) Web-based sec data: social networking, blogs, news…
2) Primary data FIRST-HAND DATA, SPECIALLY FOR THIS RESEARCH
– data never gathered before
– more suitable data
– more costly and time-consuming
TYPES OF DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUES
Sources for researching customers
– Observation of customer behavior
– Surveys and questionnaires for customers and staff
Point-of-sale feedback
Phone surveys
Focus groups
Online surveys
Personal interviews
Sales staff
Social media workshops
Role-play exercise
Primary data collection: observation
A) Participant observation The researcher enters the social world of those to be observed and attempts to participate in their activities by becoming a member of their workgroup, organization, or community.
B) Non-participant observation The researcher is not part of the situation being studied. The researcher watches but does not take part in the activities of the research.
The physical services cape model: observe people within the real service environment
The virtual servicescape model: observe people within the virtual service environment
Focus group
– It is the process of obtaining possible ideas or solutions to a marketing problem from a small group of respondents by discussing it.
– The emphasis in this method is on the results of group interaction when focused on a series of topics a discussion leader introduces.
– Each participant in a group of five to nine or more persons is encouraged to express views in each topic and to elaborate on or react to the views of the other participants.
– The objectives are similar to unstructured in-depth interviews, but the moderator plays a more passive role than an interviewer does
– The focus-group discussion offers participants more stimulation than an interview; presumably this makes new ideas and meaningful comments more likely.
– There are 3 roles:
The participants
The moderator who conducts the focus-group
The observers
Questionnaire design
Open-ended questions are those to which the respondent replies in her or his own words. In other words, the researcher does not limit the response choices. What advantages, if any, do you think ordering from an e-retailer company offers compared with buying from local retail outlets? (Probe: What else?)
A closed-ended question requires the respondent to select from a list of responses. Closed-ended questions that ask the respondents to choose between Two answers. Did you heat the Danish roll before serving it? Yes 1 No 2
Multiple-choice questions: Closed-ended questions that ask the respondent to choose among several answers.
I’d like you to think back to the last footwear of any kind that you bought. I’ll read you a list of descriptions and would like for you to tell me into which category it falls. Dress and/or formal 1 Specialized athletic shoe 4 Casual 2 Boots 5 Canvas-trainer-gym shoes 3.
Scaled-response questions are questions that have a predefined answer list with options that are incrementally related to each other with the purpose of measuring the intensity to which a respondent feels toward or about something.
EG: you may want to ask your customers how they rate the taste of a supermarket’s own brand tomato soup; the scaled-response list might be on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 means they do not like the taste at all, and 7 means they completely love the taste.
Now that you have used the product, would you say that you would buy it or not? (CHECK ONE) ❑ Yes, would buy it ❑ No, would not buy it
POV
We should construct a narrowly-focused POV as this:
Will allow you to:
- Ideate and solve your design challenge in a goal-oriented manner in which:
- You keep a focus on your users, their needs and your insights about them which you’ve come to know in your research or empathize mode.
- Your POV captures your design vision by defining the right challenge to address in the ideation sessions.
- Generate a greater quantity and higher quality solutions when you and your team start generating ideas during later brainstorm, brainwriting, scamper and other ideation session and will drive the rest of the design work..
- Will be your guiding statement that focuses on insights and needs of a particular user, or composite character. it’s easy to get lost in the ideations sessions if you don’t have a well-defined POV
- Will help you to keep you on track. it helps you design for your users and their needs point of view definition
Rewriting the design challenge:
Point of view steps:
IDEATE
– creative problem-solving process where ideas are generated
– based on observation and POV, we create the improved version of the idea and the solution
– these ideas have been redefined with and combined with the perceptions, opinions, and feedback obtained with our buyer personas.
– CREATIVITY + PERSPECTIVES + APPROACHES + DEFINE