Cultural Probes

Cultural Probes
For studying groups that are not well acquainted/familiar, it is
often difficult to gain a true understanding of the group’s culture,
behaviours and attitudes, preferences, concerns and desires.
• If the group is not familiar, traditional surveys, questionnaires
and various observational techniques are likely to produce
responses that are guarded and merely scratch the surface.
• Cultural probes are sets of simple artifacts (such as maps,
postcards, cameras, or diaries) that are given to users for them
to record specific events, feelings or interactions in their usual
environment, in order to get to know them and their culture
better.
• Cultural probes are used to uncover aspects of culture and
human interaction like (1) emotions, (2) values, (3)
connections, and (4) trust.
 Cultural Probes
Responses from these probes initiate a communication.
• With minimal intrusion, researchers can glean insights into
participants’ environments that can help to (1) identify
problem statements, (2) uncover new opportunities, and (3)
inspire the designer with new ideas and novel solutions.

Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti first introduced cultural
probes when they worked on the Presence Project in the
European Union. The project was open-ended and was intended
to explore ways to increase the involvement of the elderly in
three communities (Gaver et al, 1999).
• Aesthetically inviting and informal probes were developed to
facilitate the research.
• Probes were delightful, but not childish or condescending to
encourage a playful, casual attitude from participants.
Cultural Probes
Cultural Probes
Cultural Probes
 Cultural Probes
Reporting the Results

(About probes)

(About participants)

(Results summary)
 Cultural Probes
Process
1. Kit Design – Researchers must identify the goals of the
cultural probes, as well as the activities and materials that will
support these goals. Too specific instructions could limit the
insights that may come from the probes (Gaffney, 2006).
2. Demographics – Participants should be carefully selected
based on research goals.
3. Delivery – Kits are delivered to participants—if possible in
person, or elaborate instructions are provided to explain each
item and the overall intention of the research. Participants are
asked to follow the instructions and send the information
back to the researcher. Usually given a lengthy period of time
to complete the kits but could be asked to send individual
tasks back to the researcher early as well.
 Cultural Probes
4. Materials – While there are no fixed components in a cultural
probe, designers should carefully select the items, as well as
the overall design of the kit, in order to elicit the desired
response. Kits should be playful yet professional. Kits might
include items such as disposable cameras, maps, stickers,
postcards, notebooks, gifts, etc.
5. Activities – Include instructions with the kit to guide
participants on completing the tasks. For example: “Take a
picture of the heart of your house”, or “show us the first five
places that you would take a friend from out of town by
placing a sticker at each location on the map”.
6. Follow-up – Once the kits are completed, the researcher
meets with the participants again—either individually or as a
group—to share the inspiration that the user’s artifacts
sparked and to engage in deeper conversation where
appropriate.
 Cultural Probes
7. Analysis – A debriefing session can be conducted with
participants to interpret the probes, as well as to identify
similarities and patterns. Researchers will then interpret the
findings and may contact participants to clarify and validate
them.

Variations
Cultural Probes have been used when trying to design in
“sensitive settings” such as mental health institutions where
traditional observation methods could be problematic.
Brainstorming
 Brainstorming
A method for generating ideas, intended to inspire the free-
flowing sharing of thoughts of an individual or a group of people,
typically along while withholding criticism in order to promote un-
inhibited thinking.
• Good brainstorming focuses on the quantity and creativity of
ideas: the quality of ideas is much less important than the
sheer quantity.
• After ideas are generated, they are often grouped into
categories and prioritized for subsequent research or
application.
Brainstorming is useful for:
• Identifying a wide range of ideas and solutions to existing or
new problems.
• Creating group ownership of ideas.
• Improving group cohesiveness.
 Brainstorming
Procedure
1. Decide on the question or topic that you will present to the
group during brainstorming. Avoid questions and topics that
are too narrow or too broad.
2. Develop a set of brainstorming rules and review those with
the participants. The most basic rules could include:
• No verbal or non-verbal criticism.
• Quantity, not quality is the goal so extreme ideas are
welcome.
• No arguing over ideas or telling of long stories (be succinct).
• Clarification is fine, but should be focused and brief.
3. Heterogeneous group is likely to bring out more diversity in
ideas, but a group that is too heterogeneous (bringing in
outsiders who are unknown to most of the team) may not
achieve a comfort level in a short time. (Some say a group size
that ranges from five to twelve participants)
 Brainstorming
5. Plan how you will record and track the results of the
brainstorming session.
6. Describe the topic and procedures for the session. Review the
brainstorming rules. Describe what you will do with the data
and how the results will be used.
7. Ask if anyone has any questions about the session, and begin
the brainstorming by asking participants to call out their ideas
as quickly as possible.
8. At the end of the brainstorming, walk through all the ideas
and make sure that the meaning of the idea is clear.
9. At this point, you might want to choose a subset of ideas for
subsequent use. You can do this in number of ways including:
consensus, rating of all items, and having another group
decide which ideas to consider further.
Brainstorming
 Brainstorming
The outcomes of brainstorming are:
1. A list of ideas or solutions related to a particular problem.
2. The ideas or solutions organized into groups.
3. Some form of prioritization based on attributes like cost,
feasibility, popularity, etc.

Benefits
1. Many ideas can be generated in a short time.
2. Requires few material resources.
3. The results can be used immediately or "preserved" for
possible use in other projects.
 Brainstorming
Advantages
1. Is a "democratic" way of generating ideas.
2. Could get over "design" blocks that are slowing development.

Challenges
1. Requires an experienced facilitator who understands the
social psychology of small groups.
2. Requires a dedication to quantity rather than quality.
3. Can be chaotic and intimidating to introverts.
4. May not be appropriate for some business or international
cultures.
 Metaphor Brainstorming
In the context of Design, "A metaphor is a word, sound, image, or
a physical or virtual concept that helps people to understand a
system and that describes one thing in terms of another.“

Metaphor brainstorming is a method for generating metaphors

and extracting aspects of those metaphors that can be applied to
the design of hardware, software, processes, and services.
• Examples - we can frame a user interface as a “desktop”, an
“online store” as an “art gallery”, a powered-down state as
“hibernation”. We can apply the physical concept of “friction”
to the fluidity of a user interface.
• Mapping the metaphors and their attributes and components
(the "source" domain) to possible system functions (the
"target" domain). For example, the concept of the visual
appeal of a physical shopping cart may suggest/inspire ways to
make your virtual cart more appealing to your online
customers.
Metaphor Brainstorming
 Metaphor Brainstorming
Metaphor brainstorming involves:
1. Brainstorming metaphors that relate to a particular
topic/concept or product. For example, if you were interested
in designing a new e-commerce site, you would use traditional
brainstorming to explore metaphors like checkout counter,
aisles, coupons, sales tables, shopping carts, and receipts.
2. Selecting a set of the metaphors from your original
brainstorming session and then conducting a deconstruction
session where your focus is to elicit (uncover) attributes and
objects associated with the metaphors. For example, the
metaphor "aisle" can be deconstructed into (1) attributes like
"length", "width", "height", "visual appeal", "ease of
updating", and "number of intersections" and (2)
components/objects like "signs", "floor graphics",
"educational panels", and "coupon holders".
Metaphor Brainstorming
 Metaphor Brainstorming
The semiotic trapezium with the cultural component (the ellipse)
Organizing Data
Affinity Diagramming
 Affinity Diagramming
Affinity diagramming/mapping is the technique of taking a
number of distinct and separate items (like statements made by
users or observations made by a researcher) and grouping them
together to form patterns and trends.
• To organize ideas and data. The term ‘Affinity Diagram’ was
devised by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s and is also referred to as
the KJ Method.
• The tool allows large numbers of ideas stemming from
research activities like brainstorming to be sorted into groups,
based on their natural relationships, for review and analysis.
• It is also frequently used in contextual inquiry as a way to
organize notes and insights from field interviews.
• It can also be used for organizing other freeform comments,
such as open-ended survey responses, support call logs, or
other qualitative data.
 Affinity Diagramming
The affinity diagram organizes ideas with following steps:
1. Record each idea on cards or notes.
2. Look for ideas that seem to be related.
3. Sort cards into groups until all cards have been used.

Once the cards have been sorted into groups the team may sort
large clusters into subgroups for easier management and analysis.
• In many cases, the best results tend to be achieved when the
activity is completed by a cross-functional team, including key
stakeholders.
 Affinity Diagramming
Give each person a pack of post-it/sticky notes/cards and ask
them to record each collected statement on each card, along with
a short code that will allow you to track that statement back to a
participant, such as their initials.
• Focus on statements that seem to have relevance to the
design, either specifically (a feature statement) or in a more
general way (a statement that represents as participant’s
attitude to the company or subject matter).
• If some cards belong to more than one group, you can write
duplicates and place them in each appropriate group.
Affinity Diagramming
Affinity Diagramming
 Affinity Diagramming
Some examples of the kinds of categories that you might see,
including the kind of statement you’d find in them:
1. Goals: “I try to clear off all the open items here before I leave
for the day.”
2. Mental models/Stereotypes: “I use this online tool as my
briefcase, for things I reference a lot but don’t want to carry
around with me.”
3. Ideas and feature requests: “I wish this would allow me to
undo. I keep moving the whole folder accidentally and it takes
me forever to cancel out of it.”
4. Frustrations: “I’d ask the help desk about this, but half the
time they don’t know what the problem is either.”
5. Workarounds: “This takes so long to do here that I just end up
printing out the list and working with it throughout the day.
Then at the end of the day I enter in the results.”
6. Value statements: “This tool here saves me a lot of time, so if
you’re making changes don’t take it away!”
Card Sorting
 Card Sorting
In a card sorting activity, participants (working either individually
or in small groups) are given items printed on cards and are asked
to put them into groups that make sense to them.
• Either they group them into categories that are provided
beforehand (closed sort), or they make their own groups and
title each group themselves (open sort).
• One might also perform an open sort first, identify distinct
groups/categories, and then conduct closed sort to assign
members to these unique groups.
• At the end of the round of card sorting you should begin to see
common patterns emerge in how people are sorting the items,
as well as common areas of confusion or disagreement.
• A common reason for doing this is to create a site map for a
website/application or to create a hierarchy of content,
categories, and subcategories.
Card Sorting
 Card Sorting
Card sorting is a technique in user experience design in which a
person tests a group of subject experts or users to generate a
dendrogram (category tree) or folksonomy.
• It is a useful approach for designing information architecture,
workflows, menu structure, or web site navigation paths.

Card sorting using

frequency data
 Card Sorting
The Basic Process
Collect the items you’d like to include in the card sort; 40 to 60
might be a good range.
• You need enough to allow for a potentially large number of
card groups to be created, but not so many as to overwhelm
the participants or yourself with options.
• Choose items that you think will be easy to understand and
free from unnecessary jargon. You can include some subject-
matter terms that you believe your user groups are likely to
know, but avoid including too many “insider”/specialized
terms.
 Card Sorting
Once you have your list of items, put them onto cards that can be
easily grouped and ungrouped.
• Perform a test run by asking someone to sort the cards into
groups and give the groups names—for example, by putting a
label on the stack.
• Ideally, your test participant is someone unfamiliar with the
items and the activity. This will help you get a rough idea of
how long the activity might take.
• If the test run takes too much time, you may need to cut out
some cards. Ideal cards for elimination would be
redundant/repeated ideas.
Card Sorting
 Card Sorting
Once you have a finalized deck, you can bring in a real participant
and give these basic instructions (this would typically complete an
open card sorting exercise) -
1. Arrange/lay out these cards in groups that make sense to you.
2. Try to have at least two cards in a group. If a card seems to
belong to no group, you can place it to the side.
3. At any time as you’re sorting, you can name a group. By the
end of the activity, please name as many groups as you can.
 Card Sorting
In closed card sorting the groups listed by different participants
could now be compared with each other and a single list of
distinct unique group labels can be generated.
• These unique list of labels could now be used as final list of
groups. A new set of participants could assign the different
items in the original list to each of these groups.
• A frequency analysis of this data might inform which items
would finally be allotted to which groups.