Cultural Probe v1
This is our first attempt at a cultural probe.
We've never made one before so this turned out to be an interesting learning experience for both of us.
Our process followed these four steps.
Prep
Making the box
Testing the box
Insights
Prep #
First things first, what do we aim to gain from this box?
We want:
- Insight in our users
- Gather data relevant to our research
- Find new insights
We started with the questions we wanted to ask our users.
Since this first box was for an assignment and due to few other factors we only had one day to actually test the box on our users.
This meant that the data was very limited and not super specific to our research questions since we weren't able to reach our specific target audience.
We listed the questions we definitely wanted to put in the box and anything that came to mind.
Some that were scrapped were: Taking some pictures, free pizza coupon as motivation, how many notifications the user has, and what they find important that wasn't in the news.
Making the box #
We made the 'box', but it was pretty limited.
With some paper we made a little bundle where people would answer our questions. Pens and colorful pencils were provided in case they wanted to use them.
Testing the box #
Time to test!
As mentioned before, we only had one day to test our users so the data we got wasn't really representative of our target audience we are researching. Nevertheless we did learn quite a few things, we'll dive deeper in our insights later.
We got the box back after a day and were happy to see that our users filled out every part of it.
Insights #
When we got the boxes back it was time to gain some insights.
After taking a look at the data that was filled in we noticed that our users interpreted our questions in different ways.
This lead us to make sure to clarify our questions in the next iteration where needed.
We want our users to speak freely but not interpret the questions in the wrong way.
Questions that were meant to show a progression over time did not work since the time window was one day here. We hope to be able to include these type of questions in the future iterations.