Exploring how people live and work can aid fresh thinking and innovation. In particular, discovering how people actually interact with products and services can challenge assumptions.
Individual Interviews: 1-1 structured talk
Provide information on an individual actions, approach & motivations, hard to elicit from groups
Involving users in practical trials
Users directly involved in practical trials & constructive discussions about their views & attitudes
Lead user: committed user input
Consumers who are passionately interested in new developments and who become early adopters
Methods for observing people in action
Methods requiring designers & researchers to observe real people in everyday situations
Opinion Polls: represent whole population
Questions asked of defined people samples give reliable measures of entire population views
Psuedo-documentary: fictional user view
Users describe how they'd live with a conceptual product knowing that they are constructing fiction
