Probes add insight to the user experience
Specialists who have traditionally focussed their efforts on product usability are now developing methods, tools and techniques to ensure that products also meet people’s emotional needs and desires. This move to involving users to a greater extent in the design process accompanies a significant shift in focus from user interface to user experience design.
Designers and developers must be able to empathise with the potential users of their product or service, and understand the functional, personal and social contexts in which they operate. Some people suggest that this emotional link may be as important as usability in interface design. They believe that products that have been designed on the basis of human computer interaction models and passed usability tests, do not always become intimately linked with people’s lives on an emotional level.
We have found, through our research, that engaging people in creative expression can be an effective way of exploring user experiences. Through activities such as scrap book creation, collage making, drawing, photo surveying, storytelling and diary keeping people are able to express deeply held feelings, attitudes and emotions which they may find difficult to reveal in interviews alone. The material returned by participants in these activities is informative in itself as well as being a good starting point for personal storytelling. This helps people explore and express their ideas, desires and perceptions.
Probes are design orientated toolkits that encourage users to reflect upon and document their experiences. They can incorporate a number of the different creative activities and are used to capture data on people’s lives, values, feelings, perceptions, attitudes and social and physical environments.
There are several reasons for applying Probes:
- To capture information about the users or existing products and services
- To encourage user participation within the design process
- To spark dialogue between the people who use products and the people who design them
- To gather inspiration for developing designs and generating new design concepts.
The probe kits are designed to capture information about the user’s experiences in the context in which they happen. As such, the kits are tailored to individual projects to ensure that the probe tasks and tools are appropriate for the area of research and capture the type of data that the design team are looking for. The approach is usually complemented with interviews where the returned probes are used to prompt discussion and elicit a deeper understanding than could be gauged from the probe responses alone.
Probes can also be applied to prepare users to express their creativity in later participatory sessions. Here, probes are used to introduce participants to the products or services in question, so that they are better prepared to discuss interpretations, share information and even create design ideas of their own. Given the appropriate tools, users can express their needs and desires as they are encouraged to reflect and generate ideas derived from their own experiences and emotions.
We have found that probes can be a useful tool in facilitating exchange between the people who experience the products, interfaces and systems and the people who design them. Our experience in user research and user-centred design enables us to provide you with valuable insights into your customers, your products and the user experiences they provide.
If you have any questions about this article or would be interested in finding out more about what the users of your products and services really want, please contact us or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .