In this lesson you're going to make sense of all the data that you collected. The reason you want to make sense of it is right now they're just disparate data points. You need to organize them and form them into insights that then will drive ideation to help you create the meaningful and accessible experiences that you want to design. Let's start with a formal definition of sensemaking first. This is by some psychologists and I think really captures the essence of what sensemaking is. Sensemaking is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections which can be among people, places and events in order to anticipate their trajectories, and act effectively. So, where do you start? It's an ambitious goal, but how do you start? The first thing that you want to do is lay out all the data that you collected. What I like to do, is find a space, maybe a corner of a room or even a large sheet of cardboard. Post up everything that you've got. So you'll wanna write, post up photographs, quotes that you've collected, perhaps drawings that you made during an observation, any artifacts you have. You may have collected a few products along the way that the people you are observing like to use. One of my favorite things that we've once done during a laying out of all the data is to actually play the music that our people for whom we are designing were listening to. In this case, it was Indian Bollywood music. It totally transformed the space, and reminded us who we were designing for, and what was important to them. Many people find making sense of the data difficult. I'm gonna give you four synthesis techniques that I find are easy to use and quickly help you make sense of the data. The first technique I'm gonna teach you is personas, the second is journey maps, the third is diagrams, and the fourth is the two by two matrix. By the end of this you'll have a much better sense of all that data points you collected, and a sense of how to move forward with the data. Let's start with personas. Personas help create memorable, realistic characters that represent the set of stakeholders. Consider for example, the research we were doing on an e-commerce site. We interviewed many people, very different people have different interests, but in the end we made a composite character that captured many of the needs and the values of those people together. So what's the first step in creating persona? Much like in organizing data, you wanna get out all the information. You wanna think about a couple things. What are all the things that people said that you talked to? What were all the things that they were thinking? What did they tell you were thinking? What were they feeling, and then what were they doing? Get this all out. I find it's helpful if you put it on post it notes and spread it out on a table with your team, to look at it all together. Next you're gonna want to pool all this information together in a formal persona. Let's walk through this persona of Bae. This persona was made also for an e-commerce site. They were interested in helping busy, young workers shop for groceries. Let's look at the elements of this persona. In the upper left, you have a photograph of the person. There are many different people that this persona was based on, and this is one picture that captures many of the elements. He's a young guy. He's single, lives in Korea, and his name is Bae. There's a quintessential quote that captures the essence of this person. In this case, Bae's case, my life is too busy to shop. So if there's one thing you need to know about this person, he's just too busy. Down below we have details about the personal profile. These are more details about how Bae gets to work, where he lives, what he prioritizes, a little more of the story behind him. So you feel like you know him by the end. On the right you have key attributes. These are the critical attributes that are going to inform your design. In the case of Bae, he works long hours, he dreads grocery shopping, and he commutes on the subway to work. Next you want to articulate those specific attributes that are related to the shopping experience that you care about. In this case, Bae likes routine, he buys the same thing every week, and he doesn't own a car. Because this is an online website that they were developing we have some details about his internet usage, some goals, and then a reminder of what the company's goals. Persona should be something that you reference throughout the design process to remind yourself who is it that you're designing for, and when you have a question about which design direction to go, you may ask yourself, what would they prefer? The next method I'd like to discuss is journey maps. Journey maps capture the critical things that people say, think and do, and feel at critical touch points throughout the experience. The main difference between a journey map and a persona is that a journey map occurs over a period of time. Consider this journey map from a project that was worked on by a team looking at families with down syndrome. They first started thinking, what are the critical touch points of a family with down syndrome. The way they decided to break this up based on their research was, when the baby's born, when they go to grade school, and when they transition into adulthood. That allowed them to think about the critical things that the families and the students were thinking and feeling and doing at each moment, and what were opportunities for design to come in and improve those different periods of time. What I like about journey maps is it makes you think about the experience over time. Too often when we're designing, we often just think about one small experience and forget that it's often situated in a sequence of many activities over a person's lifetime. The third technique I'll discuss with you is diagramming. Diagramming is probably a technique you've used in many aspects in your life before. It's about categorizing information into meaningful areas. So what are effective approaches to diagramming. First, what you're gonna want to do is your gonna look for broad themes. Now, you're gonna find different kinds of themes. You may find one theme that fits all of the categories. If you find one theme that fits all the categories, try to break it down into different themes. One good technique for doing this, is to do this on sticky notes. So you may put a item in one category at first, and over time, change the categories and put it in another. Then what you're going to do, once you have themes that you're comfortable with and your teammates are comfortable with, you're gonna try and make connections between them. You're gonna figure out, how do these themes relate, and what are tensions between these themes, and by understanding the relationship, you're gonna understand opportunities where design can help resolve tension, or perhaps strengthen the connection between two things. The last technique I wanna talk to you about is the two by two matrix. This is about comparing data by two different attributes. Consider the following two by two matrix. This was used by the woman designing the community blog for her company that I discussed earlier. She wanted to think that there were many people in her company that were interested in being on this blog, but she couldn't prioritize all of them, and she couldn't design for all of them effectively. So she thought, what are the two critical attributes? In her mind they were, who has power in the organization, and who has a passion for the topics on the community blog. So on the X axis, she put power, and on the Y axis she put passion, and as you'll see, she then tried to think who are people with high passion and high power. Well, those are the people we wanna engage daily on the blog. The people with low passion and high power well, we'll keep them satisfied, and then the people with low power and low passion will maintain the pulse. So this is a community blog, we want to know what everybody is thinking but we won't actively attend to them, and finally, the people with low power and high passion. Well, we'll keep them informed. And by coming up with this matrix of the various stakeholders, she was able to design features that primarily supported the upper right quadrant, but also attended to the other ones. Now that you've done the research and you have some key insights into how people work, the sequence of events in which they work, and the context in which they're working. It's time to identify opportunity areas. Let me give you a case study to illustrate how this works. Consider this pair of glasses. It's an adjustable pair of glasses that allow you to adjust the lens strength on the go. I could use them and then hand them off to a family member, who could then put them on and adjust them for their ability. Well, these didn't just come about. Somebody had to identify the opportunity area first. Let's consider how they did this using an opportunity area mad lib. You'll notice you want to think about the people first, then add the need and then the insight. So here's an example, these designers realized that people with poor vision, like myself, need a way to read when glasses are lost or broken. This is a lovely opportunity area from which they then could brainstorm a whole different set of solution. One perhaps was glasses, another perhaps was a set of contact lenses. Another perhaps was a different set of reading materials that had larger text. There's a whole different set of answers that you could, solutions that you could brainstorm based on this opportunity area. One thing I wanna warn you about, it is to make sure that you don't make your opportunity area embed a solution in it. So, here's an example of a bad opportunity area statement that would have only led to one solution and not a breadth of solutions that are necessary for getting to an innovative idea. They could have said, people with poor vision need a pair of glasses that are adjustable. That would have lead them directly to this solution, but they may not have been able to consider a whole host of other solutions that inform this final solution. So in this lesson, you learned techniques for making sense of what people say and do, and translating that into what it means. The deep insights that are gonna help you create meaningful and accessible experiences for everybody to enjoy.
