Objective
The objective of this research was to inspire to unearth an innovative approach to make an ideal Roadtrip Experience.
“ This project expresses the emotions, opinions, and experiences that users and non-users have endured through their lives related to their road trip experiences.”
What is contextual research?
Contextual research is a form of inquiry that implements various methodologies & inductive reasoning to understand user's unarticulated needs within its context.
Research Process
To understand the experiences and feelings of the users we need to observe, listen, interact, and understand them.
Through the methods and techniques like observations, interviews, cultural probe, sensory cue kit, and participatory research we collected all of the data that supports this research
Observation Phase
This technique serves to examine people doing the activity in their natural habitat in an ethical non-intrusive manner
Key observations
The observations revealed new individual behaviors, social relations, material items and other social things and facts whose meaning was discovered through repeated observation.
Therefore listing repeated observations was crucial and forms the basis of our future research.
Putting the field notes down in writing immediately was very helpful. We used pen and paper, in addition to our smartphones
What is a Cultural probe?
Cultural probes use a collection of tools, artefacts and tasks intended to provoke the user to look and think about their environment in new ways. The probe is aesthetically inviting and informal to facilitate the research rather than to control the process
Important insights
•People are excited to share their travel stories
•Weather is a determining factor for many travellers
• The United States is a country well suited for road trips
•The vehicle is important in their decisions regarding road trips
What is a Sensory Cue Kit?
A Sensory Cue Kit is a set of objects that lead participants to make choices that can be analyzed in patterns of high frequency
It is important to find out the experience of the users and getting to know the "why". To understand the why we conducted interviews with our users.
What are Personal Interviews?
Interviews are a fundamental research method for direct contact with participants, to collect first-hand personal accounts of experience, opinions, attitudes, and perceptions.
Analyze
After collecting data, we moved on to a deep dive into all data points via the process of affinitization.
Affinitization is an inductive method of analysis, working from the bottom up to to make sense of individual data points
Yellows
The first stage of affinity mapping was to cluster all our data points based on our intuition. As a group, we wrote over 1000 individual data points on to yellow sticky notes. These data points were from our secondary and primary research.
Blues
After long hours of grouping the data points, we assigned headers to our yellow data clusters using blue notes. The blue insights were detailed descriptions of every data point under one cluster and addressed the emotions under each point.
Pinks
The key issues of users are identified in the clustered Blues and written on pinks.These are also written in the voice of the user.
Greens
We finally assigned headers to the pink notes using green notes. These further distilled our data into abstracts describing themes. After much deliberation, we were able to refine the results of our data into the voice of the user into 16 groups.
After affinitizing all our data points, two personas emerged from them
The free spirit
The mindful soul
Framework:
A design framework is a simple visual structure that helps organize the information and ideas of a problem so you can work on it more effectively.
