Finally the final part of the 3d blog. As I mentioned in the previous posts on 3d, there are very poor tools for creating great looking 3d user experiences. This article will not concern itself with the aesthetics of 3d or the usefulness, utility or desirability of 3d UI’s, for discussions on that see here.
First off I’ll do a quick overview of the basic tools for creating 3d assets before diving into the tools for creating interactive 3d for different kinds of user experiences. This is a high level guide to the topic and in no way attempts to be exhaustive, just hopefully helpful.
Tools for digital illustration - Just creating great looking 3d.
The biggest tool provider for anykind of 3d anything is Autodesk. They are the million pound gorilla when it comes to 3d tools. Over the last few years they have swallowed up what used to be the top 3 tools in the 3d world, Autodesk SoftImage (formally XSI), Autodesk 3ds MAX and Autodesk MAYA - all previously rivals (stunning the DOJ where asleep at the wheel for those purchases) . These are considered the mega premium tools and have almost religious followings in the 3d community from game makers to film makers but to be honest from my perspective as a 15,000 foot generalist they are more or less identical in terms of capabilities. They are also ‘huge’ from a time investment perspective as they combine multiple sub tools, for animation, modeling and rigging, physics, creating shaders, lighting and rendering. Whilst they are widely used and regarded by moviemakers and game-makers there are plenty of much less expensive alternatives that can do 90% of the same basic things.
Sooner or later you will want to visit Turbosquid - it’s a huge 3d web marketplace for models, shaders, plug in tools and tutorials some of which are free.
COLLADA™ Is an open source intermediate file format that defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - something that you will quickly discover is a god send. This includes geometry, materials, textures, lights, camera, animations, instantiations, and scenes. COLLADA also includes skinning and morphing for character animation. Shader effects for several shader languages as well as some physics support.
Once you’ve created or bought your 3d models, products like Autodesk Showcase include a fancy real-time 3d engine which allows you to move around high end renderings of industrial design models in real time, complete with soft shadows and high end shaders. (Car interior image below is showcase)
This tool is primarily intended for doing ‘pre-visualization’ and design review of industrial design forms using the power of the high end video cards and is a glimpse at what’s possible with the latest rendering engines. They also include the ability to play with libraries of pre made common materials, and environment lighting and immediately see the result, which has historically been a massive time waste with traditional renderer’s.
Hypershot Bunkspeed, is a quasi-competitor to Showcase allowing you to do semi-real time high dynamic range lighting, (HDRI). HDRI is a technique for doing image based lighting, which is how you get something to look photo real. The product is mesmerizing, super easy to use, and really useful for illustration. Simply drag the high end shaders onto the model, pick your image based lighting and (image below) is what you get. The soft shadows and ray tracing capabilities make the output look spectacular.
There is also a plugin for Google’s Sketchup tool that uses Bunkspeed. Sketchup is the world’s easiest 3d box-modeling tool, ideal for quick 3d sketches of physical relationships; bunkspeed kind of makes anything look hot with the right HDRI image choice.
RTT is a technology company making another one of these real time 3d rendering Showcase like tools. I find this type of product interesting because of how they clearly demonstrate what is possible with real time, high-end rendering. RTT also offers sever based rendering solutions which can deliver rendered frames to less capable hardware in semi-real time. This allows car configuration UI’s to be done remote from the client. (TT image below is real time)
3d Real time UI Rendering API’s
OpenGL® ES is a low-level API for advanced graphics using well-defined subset of OpenGL. Open GL has largely become the standard API for doing high end 3d outside of the PC and XBOX platforms which are dominated by Microsoft’s competing Direct X technology. GL-ES provides a low-level applications programming interface (API) between software applications and hardware or software graphics engines. Apple developers have the option to use open GL ES on the I-phone and now the I-PAD for example.
The wizzy bookshelf spin into the bookstore effect from the IPAD launch video, another example of 3d metaphors successfully working to add some bling to a product announcement.
These API’s make it easier for developers (mostly games developers) to write code that is slightly abstracted from the exact hardware it will run on, making it more compatible with a wider audience.
WEBGL - WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free, open web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element. The basic premise is that most browser makers (except IE perhaps) are working together to enable basic support for this as part of the HTML 5 specification, which is still a year or two away from prime time. These open standards would go along way to making 3d UI not require a specialized engine plugin (like Flash or Anark); many people are hyped up about the potential for this to finally let the 3d cat out of the proverbial bag.
Nvidia’s TEGRA 3d UI
This 3d UI (carousel image shown in the article header) was shown in working from June 2008, and generated significant excitement that a 3d touch based UI that looked reasonably hot would actually become a commercial reality. Turns out this UI will not apparently see the light of day according to this report. I believe the UI below was authored using the now extinct tool ANARK game face which was bought from Anark after having been a tool for implementing 3d UI’s in games for a several years.
Tools for building 3d UX Today.
Today as a designer wanting to create a real time 3d interactive experience your choice is pretty much limited to Adobe Flash with one of the various plug-ins, like Papervision or Away 3d. Inherently Flash is not a great 3d platform basically because the first thing you should know about 3D and Flash is that Flash doesn’t really support 3d. What Flash does know is how to display vector shapes on the screen and how to calculate math expressions. With that, 3D can be faked by doing really sophisticated mathematical transforms. Generally this approach is ok for minimal 3d transitions and simple geometric models but as soon as the going gets rough (say you need high polygon models or shaders) designers resort to non real time 3d and interactive pre-rendered 3d Flash movies. Still, Flash 10 or one of the plugins mentioned above is really still the de facto option for developing interactive 3d sites today albeit they are often less than spectacular and don’t really take advantage of any of your specific GPU or video card hardware (features like anti-aliasing and texture smoothing are missing). One of the worst qualities of flash based 3d is the menacing ‘jaggies’ of aliased fonts and geometry, and the ‘sparkly’ effect that is created with non smoothed textures. The creative industry is obviously heavily invested in Flash, so if Adobe keeps plugging away it’s likely 3d will become easier and better through their classic and venerable authoring suite.
Electric Rain are a small software company who make Swift 3d which is a well respected modeling and animation program for Flash. It takes 3d rendered geometry and does something like the ‘live trace’ feature in illustrator, converting it into less memory consuming 2d vectors. For canned 3d effects it’s an easy and well travelled solution for designers.
Scaleform are a company plugged into the Games community with a tool that enables them to support Flash movies inside proprietary games engines, a great deal of modern games use this technology which gives them the, coding, production and animation benefits of Flash inside their rendering engines, thus making the production of sophisticated menu systems, Hud’s, (text, maps, equipment status, health etc) or the configuration UI’s much easier.
Expression Blend is a UI building tool produced by Microsoft which can create 2d or 3d interfaces for Microsoft’s client application engine WPF, or its online cousin Silverlight. Expression Blend is ‘good’ for building 2d UI, however when it comes to 3d we are back in the dark ages. It can display and manipulate 3d models with simple mapped textures but every time we’ve tried projects utilizing 3d - we have quickly run into performance challenges (even on high end hardware). There’s no support for any sophisticated effects, shaders, anything more than the most fundamental lighting, no decent animation support. There are some 3rd party tools to make life easy on WPF. Another Electric Rain product (I’ve not used) ZAM 3D is a 3D XAML Tool for Microsoft Windows Application Development. It provides developers and designers with a quick and easy solution for creating 3D elements for Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio projects. It also acts as a 3ds or dxf to XAML converter.
It seems increasingly clear to me that Microsoft has de-invested in WPF, and I’ve given up hope that it would become a decent way to create a 3d UI. In all the hype about WPF at its launch, there was some good demos and excitement, yet here we are 4 years on and really there are no decent product examples of WPF applications, and very few announcements from Microsoft about its roadmap.
There are a few other choices out there like Anark, which is a long in the tooth tool from yesteryear which looked very promising as a way to author 3d user experiences about 10 years ago, but today seems to have been abandoned by its parent company as a super niche tool. We’ve built some incredible 3d demo’s in Anark but the tool seems to have not received a significant update in a long while and it’s expensive.
ARToolKit is a Cross-platform Library for the creation of augmented reality applications, developed by Hirokazu Kato in 1999 and was released by the University of Washington HIT Lab. Currently it is maintained as an open source project hosted on Source Forgewith commercial licenses available from ARToolWorks
ATOMIC Authoring Tool is a Cross-platform Authoring Tool software, for Augmented Reality Applications, which is a Front end for the ARToolKit library. It was developed for non-programmers, to create small and simple, Augmented Reality applications, and released under the GNU GPL License. I’ve not used it and can’t speak to its usefulness.
The Astonishing Tribe, also known as TAT have a 3d development environment I’m curious about, its called Kastor, and I think works with TAT Cascades which is a UI framework. Some of the demo’s mentioned in my previous post’s on 3d were probably developed using this tool set. The Red-dish demo (below) they did last year utilized OPEN GL ES 2.0 shaders and anti aliasing functionality.
Kanzi is a suite of tools and technology for 3d UX development. The Kanzi SDK tool is designed to be used with OPEN GL ES on mobile devices. Its Rendering engine Kanzi Engine is supported by a range of silicon manufacturers. I’ve not used this tool in a professional context yet, but the examples on the site suggest a mature product with many of the capabilities for building good looking, hi quality 3d. At the time of writing this, I just recieved an email from a Finnish company called Rightware that has just acquired Kanzi from Futuremark.
Images above from Kanzi demos above.
I’ve purposefully left out discussing the merits game engine technologies like Unreal, ID- Tech and Valve’s Source engine, Microsoft’s XNA and many others which are less ‘tools’ and more like ‘starter kits’ for the development of 3d games, they handle low level features but they are really only for those conversant in C# or lower level languages and not really optimized for building user experiences or more general products.
I’m very interested if you know of other commercial tools for building UX and will update this blog with suggestions and comments when I receive them.
Tools for building 3d UX tomorrow.
At heart the people using UX building tools and contemplating 3d UI concepts are desperately in need of tools that allow them to ‘play’ in high performance real-time 3d quickly and easily. The lack of these tools, I’d argue is the main adoption blocker for seeing more high quality 3d user experiences. Occasionally I see something really impressive in 3d that makes it more clear what we are striving towards in terms of output from such tools. At the Intel booth at CES 2010 was a very impressive dual touch wall (Image below). This was not created (to my knowledge) with a cutting edge 3d tool but it demonstrates the kind of output UX designers like ourselves at Artefact are striving/desiring to create.
Check out a video of the animation on Youtube. This would be impossible to build in any tool that I’m currently aware of and had to be coded from scratch.
Watch this video of someone creating a “little big planet” level. This is a tool that comes with the game for players to create additional content and share with the community. You use a PS3 controller and a character to create levels within the game. Note in the video that there is no difference between building the level and being in it which makes the authoring process very experimental. Objects are ‘physically’ enabled by default. There is minimal difference between the “authoring process” and the “experiencing it” process. This tool is actually very simple to learn, super complex to master. It’s also a modern work of art.
This tool represents a kind of design target for me, today it feels especially for UX like we are down where C++ developers where years ago, down in the weeds creating everything from scratch, specifying every possible variable and property. The desire is to have a palette of starter objects, 3d controls, shaders, lights, behaviors and effects that are a starting point to start sketching great user experiences. When my sketch work is complete, allow me to dive in and get busy scripting custom behaviors, defining custom shader’s and geometry.
The complexity of 3d tools makes production a very deliberate, detailed and labor intensive process. As a result designers are limited in their ability to experiment and iterate in building 3d user experiences. So my ideal tool combines lots of ‘starter objects’ with the ‘stateless’ UI demonstrated by Little Big Planet and Autodesk’s Showcase application. With such a tool I think we’d be pretty close to the kind of tool that would take the world by storm. (Quietly I’m hoping someone sends me a link) Contact me if you want Artefact to design such a tool, right now that would be a dream project.
On the last day of this year’s IDSA conference in Miami, Rob and I shared a cab to the airport with Stuart Constantine, core77 co-founder. The three of us were recovering from an all night binge of conference party shenanigans, but we somehow mustered the strength to talk shop. We talked about the trouble John Kolko had stirred with his recent blog post on the future of industrial design. We also discussed how some of the conference presentations and discussions challenged the relevance of industrial design to today’s social and economic demands. It became clear that there was a growing chasm between old industrial design and new industrial design.
What emerged from all this talk was a manifesto to the industrial design community. Read it on www.core77.com. In it I suggest ten things an industrial designer can do to redefine their profession. Check it out and let me know what you think.
So you’ve got an idea for software or a product that’s so easy, so beneficial, that it’s for everyone: the general public. Well, you’re wrong.
Ok, that’s a little harsh. But we find it’s often over-optimism. Other times it’s beneficence: we’ve had several projects where the goal is to release information freely to the world for the greater good, reaching as many people as we can. The Encyclopedia of Life is one example (see our first post about it). In either case there’s a real danger that if you think you’re making something for everyone, you might end up appealing to no one. People have such very different needs (even from the same information) that you can’t serve all of them.
There are at least two ways to go wrong:
1. Just design with the features that naturally seem needed. After all, ‘everyone’ includes you. This is the more common error. Here’s the problem in an example:
Due to differences in age and digital literacy, my grandmother and my cousin have only one single electronic device they both use every day (any guesses?). She’ll only use something if you’ve taken great care to design it for her, and he’ll drop it as soon as it’s missing something he wants. There’s a big difference between designing a smart phone for him and a Jitterbug phone built with hardware and services targeted at seniors for her. There are lots of other factors: disposable income, communication habits, media consumption, nationality and culture, internet connectivity, and many more. It’s important to know which ones matter for your idea.
2. Try to accommodate everyone under the sun: grandmothers, toddlers, and your neighbor’s dog. Support every type of user’s key tasks by adding buttons or deepening navigation and soon everyone has a harder time finding and using what they need. The opportunity to make a great experience for some gets diluted into a mediocre experience for all and, despite your intentions, that might mean no one uses it. Does my digital picture frame really need to support on board photo editing? And printing? Play MP3s? Read RSS and show sports scores? When using it, it might be complex to simply avoid what you don’t need.
So you want broad appeal and good design. How can you start identifying your users?
As a warm-up, think of some well-known groups or use the ones others have identified, like tweens or business travelers. We’ve done brainstorming sessions where we randomly pair a particular segment of people with particular capabilities. You might find some groups yield more ideas than others.
Next, are you building on an existing product? Talk to the product team. If that’s you, think about the usage and feedback data you could gather. Or maybe there’s something else out there that has some similar qualities. See if you can learn about the people using it, and especially how and why. A lot of times you might be surprised. Twitter’s creators were surprised when the service was used by news, emergency response organizations, and politicians. The film industry once tried to kill VCRs but in the end they were largely used for purchased and rented content, which was a huge boon for them. Look carefully and you might find an unmet need that could be an opportunity.
Now think of the qualities of your idea that clearly distinguish it from others. Do any of these qualities seem aligned to particular groups you can identify? For example, if your offering is a new communication tool, you might think of teens, who are notorious communicators in multiple modalities.
Go out and test your theories. If you’re right you can look at their tasks and needs to start getting a vision of the product.
I’m not suggesting that you need to focus on only one specific group to get a good result. But the more you focus on a coherent target, the better chance you have of attracting and exciting them. If you nail it, they’re likely to bring other groups with them.
Any time you communicate your findings, you have to think about your audience and your message. International field research is the same. However, one challenge I’ve experienced is that it can be hard for the audience to understand a foreign environment and this can affect their understanding of the findings. As a result, I spend a lot of time setting context so my audience feels connected to the environment and therefore feels more connected to the insights. Here’s an example from one of my past projects.
Example: Chinese gamers
I was on a project where we were investigating Chinese gamers who game in internet cafes. We had a lot of quantitative data around things like average amount of time spent in the cafes, average money spent, age, gender, etc. These data points were powerful in that they communicated the scale of gaming and the opportunity potential- this was my primary message. We also had deep qualitative data from ethnographies with select gamers.
I knew my audience weren’t heavy gamers and predicted that they would have a hard time understanding the motivation of intense and collaborative gaming. This would hinder their ability to internalize my main message.
I decided to first set the context of internet cafes. I used photos of interiors and exteriors to give a sense of being there and quantitative data to reveal the prevalence of these cafes. I walked through, with photos and narration, the experience of walking into the café, getting a computer, paying, sitting down, etc. Then I introduced 3 main ‘characters’ or participants which I used throughout the rest of the presentation, especially when I wanted to connect opportunities to insights. I told a story about these participants by showing pictures, video, and audio clips about their homes, friends, when they started gaming, their favorite games, why they do it, etc.
I focused on data that would augment the quantitative data later on. For example, one point was that X percentage of gamers go to the internet café even though they have a pc at home because they want to hang out with their friends. I included video of the gamers talking about the feeling they have when they go to the café: the familiarity of everyone knowing who you are and the pride experienced when everyone knows you took the high score last night.
Setting the context and introducing the participants took up about 40% of my presentation, but it was well worth it. The audience felt connected to these participants, and through pictures and voice, understood the importance of gaming in their lives. They were memorable people, which meant the key message was also memorable, as they were always tied to these participants.
It’s such a privilege to be allowed into someone’s life to do research. So much is learned and a connection is formed. International field research is really hard work, but so gratifying when you can tell someone’s story thousands of miles away and be their voice. Even more gratifying is the impact of this research. The opportunities founded by the insights. The design inspired by your participants’ lives. The emotion evoked from this design.
I hope this series of posts have proved useful, will help your quest to tell someone’s story and inspire design in the near future!
You are now back home from your international research trip and are ready to begin the daunting task of organizing and analyzing the data. Stop! Back up! You could do this, but there’s a better way.
Instead, start organizing and analyzing while you are in field. Ideally, I like to set aside 2 afternoons for this; half way through the research and close to the end.
Tip #1: Create a data organization scheme in field
Your time is first well spent organizing all the data you have, including recordings, artifacts, notes, etc. You’ll be really happy you created this organization scheme when you’re back home in a completely different environment, buried in emails, and the trip already seems in the distant past. Creating a scheme will also help you figure out if you are missing any data and you’ll have a chance to correct this before you leave.
Tip #2: Think about ways to communicate your data
It’s also fruitful to start thinking about effective ways to communicate your data. By now, you’ve likely met a participant whose story is particularly riveting or you’ve heard a really powerful quote. Take some time to jot these down and brainstorm new approaches while it is fresh and your in-field creative juices are flowing. If you have a team in field with you, it’s productive to meet with them and understand which specific data impacted them and why. This will help you understand what will resonate and have emotional impact with a larger audience.
Tip #3: Plan and start analysis while in field
Starting data analysis while you are in field is invaluable. One: there is no substitute for freshness of your experiences. Two: starting in field gives you more time to mull over the process or outcomes. We could always use more time on projects, no? Three: starting in field makes the task of analysis way less daunting when you arrive back home…at least you have started, and starting is indeed the hardest part. Four: Lastly, the data analysis session creates the perfect occasion to brainstorm opportunity areas and solutions based on immersion in real data; a user centered design dream come true.
Think hard about how to conduct the data analysis so that it is fruitful. Do you want to have a collaborative affinity exercise with your team members who are in field with you? Do you have the set-up ( room, wall space, etc) and the materials ( data points) ready to do this? Do you want to start this half way through or wait till you have collected all of the data? Is the point of the exercise to get team members immersed in the data or is it to really start analysis? What is a reasonable amount to get done in an afternoon? How will you record the results of the analysis? Plan the analysis session well and it will be worth your while.
So, now you are at the point where you are ready to do your analysis session- awesome! Whether you are doing it by yourself or with your colleagues, give it some structure. Define a goal, an amount of time, and some ground rules. It’s very easy to try to analyze too much during this session and come away with nothing of use.
Tip #4: Organize outcomes before you go home
It’s also easy to lose valuable cycles by doing a whole bunch of great work in field but not recording it well enough to be usable later on. Take pictures of the outcome and spend time putting it into a useful format. For example, if you are doing an affinity with post-it notes, transcribe the outcome into software like Visio so you can save it, add some meaningful notes to it, and easily re-use it for a later analysis session. I’ve tried transporting the post-its on a huge piece of paper folded up in my suitcase and unfortunately when I got back home, many of those post-its didn’t make sense anymore. When I inquired with team members, they had also forgotten what they meant. I hadn’t spent the time clarifying what some of the notes meant and it was a loss of work.
Blogging about all of these tips and tricks for doing international research makes me wish I was doing some right now! Stay tuned for the final post in this series: communicating your findings.
You’re now in field half way across the world, have jet lag, don’t speak the language, and are planning to conduct intense and fantastic research over the next few weeks. What do you do?
Tip #1: Plan 1-2 buffer days
Lesson from India
First, get some sleep. Plan 1-2 buffer days between arriving in field and starting the research to deal with jetlag, possible travel delays, and most importantly, to iron out kinks. Meet your local agency as soon as you can and plan to spend a half day with them. Build some rapport, perhaps over a cup of tea. Your success is highly dependent on your working relationship with them. Go over the schedule, participants, discussion guides, and get all of your contact phone numbers. Don’t forget the driver’s number. In my experience, this is one of the biggest ways to throw off the schedule: a misunderstanding about the meeting time.
If you are doing research at a facility, go there and ensure everything works. I once did a concept evaluation in India and when we went to the facility to check it out, we found out the audio didn’t feed into the observation room. After hours of a technician trying to fix it, we gave up and had to book another facility last minute. It meant that we lost our first participant, but at least we got data for all the rest.
Tip #2: Schedule a pilot
Lesson from China
An absolute must: Schedule a pilot (read: extra, possible throw-away, data). I cannot stress the importance of this enough. During a pilot in China, I found out: my video recorder ran out of battery half way through a session, the order of the discussion was unnatural, and there was way more traffic than we anticipated so we had to eat lunch while in the car to save time.
Having a pilot will also give you a chance to test out the translator. It seems simple, but getting a good translator is one of the big challenges with international research. First, you have to decide whether you want simultaneous or consecutive translation. I prefer simultaneous because it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the conversation and thought process of the participant, and doesn’t eat up session time like consecutive does. But, beware: getting a really good simultaneous translator is really hard in some places and it is usually a lot more expensive. Stress the importance of getting a ‘UN quality’ translator to your local agency and ask them to prepare a backup in case you are not satisfied with the one they provided after using them in the pilot.
Tip #3 : Explore the environment
Lesson from South Africa
Schedule an afternoon to explore the environment with your driver and local research expert early during your time in field. This will help you understand your participants’ lives and put what they say into context. It will also instigate discussion and questions for the local expert that you couldn’t have known were relevant to you. For example: On a project in South Africa, we were investigating financial transactions and planned to spend time at people’s homes, banks and at the shopping plazas. From exploring some neighborhoods, we noticed a lot of neighborhood pubs. Inquiring about them further and going inside revealed that there were a lot of transactions taking place in there as well; not only for alcohol but also cell phone airtime, cigarettes, and snacks. This discovery led to a few late addition interviews with pub owners and resulted in some really fruitful data.
Tip #4: Be organized about your artifact collection
Lesson from the Philippines
My last tip for a successful time in field: be organized about the artifacts you collect. It is really easy to take a ton of pictures, video, brochures, etc and end up with an overwhelming mess when you start data analysis. Figure out what’s important to you and write a list to make sure you capture all of those things consistently across sessions. Review this list after the pilot. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself only taking photos of unique things over time, like a pet goat, but when you come back you’ll have pictures like this and not enough good exterior home shots, for example. Yes, the pet goat thing really happened to me in the Philippines, one of my first international research projects.
During your time doing international research, you will not only grow your skills as a researcher, but you might also become a scheduler, technician, videographer, photographer, project manager, lunch maker, charades expert, and a plethora of other things. I hope my tips and experiences will leave you a little more successful in whichever of these professions you fall into while in field!
As we all know, field research is essential to understand your customer, their environment, and generate relevant design opportunities. It also takes a huge amount of time, can be expensive and if you’re doing it internationally, it may be the only shot you have so you’d better get it right.
In this blog series, we’ll discuss some techniques for doing international field research successfully: planning, what to do when you’re in field, data analysis, and communicating your findings. We hope they are useful and spark some conversation as well!
Like any research project, you have to figure out your goals, methods, timelines, etc in the planning stage. International research adds some complexity to this as: 1) You may not be familiar with the environment or culture at all & 2) You’re in field for a very limited amount of time and likely won’t get the opportunity to go back. So, what do you do? Find out as much as you can, about everything you can, before you go.
The local agency you partner with to arrange participant recruiting is a great resource for local knowledge, but they likely won’t provide their opinion or advice unless asked.
Ask them for advice on how to build rapport with participants: is a quick introduction ok or is it better to have a quick bite together first? You’ll need to build this time into your session.
What are the topics you should be careful about? For example, when I was doing research in India, we asked female head of households their income and spending when their husbands weren’t around, as those females that earned more than their husbands would under report their income and spending when their husbands were there as not to embarrass them.
How many people can comfortably attend the research? If you are doing research in someone’s home for example, their living quarters can be really small, so you may only have room for yourself and the translator. It is good to know this upfront so you can plan sessions ahead that other team members can attend.
Other areas to ask questions about include: safety, session lengths, cultural norms and greetings, whether it is appropriate to video record the sessions , etc.
Once you’ve settled on your recruiting criteria, with the local agency’s input of course (!), recruit participants early and start collecting data remotely. This is extremely important for a few reasons. You’ll find out early if you are going to run into recruiting glitches and will have time to plan accordingly. On one project, we were doing research in schools in China and it took 3 weeks to connect with the schools’ principal to get permission to observe and interview her teachers.
Ask participants to fill out workbooks and take pictures of their lives and have these sent to you weeks before you are in field. With this data, you can ensure you are getting participants that meet your criteria and nothing was lost in translation with your local recruiting agency. You can also use this as a method to narrow down participants; choosing the ones that were most responsive or descriptive, for example, using this as a predictor to get the most fruitful participants in field.
This data early on can also help you focus your discussion while you are in field; you can use the collected data as jumping off points for new conversation topics, or alternatively, you can leave out certain topics as you have already collected enough beforehand.
Lastly, this data can also result in rich artifacts. Pictures of important friends and family members you may not get to meet while in field serve as powerful ways to illustrate a participant’s life, while a few sentences about their life goals in their own handwriting adds authenticity to your story telling.
Phew! I could go on for another few pages! I’ll leave you with this for now. Stay tuned for the next series in this blog: tips for success while you are in field.
Data collection in India. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbachhuber/2737149619
Contact me if you want Artefact to design such a tool, right now that would be a dream project.
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