Everybody's clustering

Read the title like "Everybody's hustling."

This is where the magic happens. Your preparation for this moment was spent in interviews. But now where you cluster all your post-it notes, the act of pattern making happens. This is one of the core tools you will need to master.

Letting the data drive the clusters is important. As you cluster, groups of patterns will emerge. These groups can then be categorized. Hopefully you can identify observations you learned from your participants.

After learning more about your participants, there will be some emergent needs you might discover. Some are obvious, some are deduced with more scrutiny. The interesting part here is there will be the needs of the users you learned from research (Observed Needs) versus the needs you thought the users might have prior to your research (Perceived Needs).

When you think about product concepts, addressing users' observed needs is where you have an opportunity to create something novel, something unique. You still bring in your Designers' Intuition. But now they are Informed Design Intuitions.

For Thursday you will document your research by:

1. Capturing the clusters as a image/photo 
2. Label the discovered topics generated from the clusters and label them on the image 
3. Write 10 insights/discoveries/gained knowledge from your interviews. 
4. From the insights gathered, brainstorm 5 possible needs for a product your participants might find useful, usable and desirable. 
5. From your observed needs, create 3 product concepts that might address these needs.
6. Bring your working print out to class for critique.
7. Size of the document is 11x17 (tabloid). 
8. Remember, this is a designed document. It should have a title page, team names, give it a title. 

Review the example documents under Course Materials. Needs answers the purpose of your product. Everything you use, it addresses some kind of need. Others do it better, some do it worse. Your perceived needs are important but the observed needs generated from research are significant. Design teams can generate interesting ideas but will be similar to other design team's. Ideas generated through research tends to be more unique and sometime more subtle, but will become the differentiator to a user's experience.