In a rapidy changing world, to stay focussed, it is crucial to address the real needs of people. Enabling a mindset of "people-first" is therefore a critical criteria to suceed.
Kallisto's Experience City is a virtual city to enable truly people-centric business and deliver positive outcomes for organizations. It promotes a safe and inspiring place for participation and creativity driven by empathy. All to uncover and resolve unmet needs and pain points people are facing to inspire a truly inclusive culture with best outcomes for organizations.
At the heart of any experience based transformation are people. Putting human needs first, is vital in implementing innovation and new business strategies to enable a future facing organization. Experience City is an enabler of a people-centric vision. - founded on the principles of an Experience Mindset and structured around the Experience 5D Framework: A curated set of methods and tools helping to root people-centricity into the business. And to make certain we’re designing the right solutions for our people, Experience City leverages the power of Design Thinking to ensure we’re creating products and services that solve the right problems, in a way, that our people really need and love.
Listening and understanding!
While we listen, we empathize!
Experience City helps realize a shared vision to become a truly people-centric business and deliver long term positive and sustainable outcomes for organizations.
By applying academically proven methods and best practices of Experience Research, we explore on the "Why", the "What" and the "How" to optimize business outcomes.
Experience City offers a huge variety of methods of Experience Research to achieve best results of insights. In a suite of different research methods, the best approach for a dedicated situation can just be selected.
An overview about all the 7 methods including guidance will help to choose the right approach.
Empathy by Research and Interviews...
The 4 main dimensions of Experience Research:
Quantitative Research:
Quantitative research has a focus on numbers. Behavioral attitudes are mainly outlined by statistical and numeric results and comparisons.
Qualitative Research:
Qualitative methods consider behavioral and psychological aspects from an individual perspective, exploring on why people behave the way they do. Dedicated views of human behavior describe patterns and themes that point to dedicated human needs.
Behavioral Research:
Mainly observes what people do and is often related to a product or service.
Attitudinal Research:
Explores on people's attitudes and statements and mainly goes beyond product or service use.
Different research methods can often be a combination of the 4 dimensions described above:
A/B study
To quickly compare two variants, that have the same objective. Each option is compared separately to avoid bias. Feasible in an online format with a minimum sample size of 10 participants. Good to compare two options by standardized data.
Poll
Polls are great way to get quick feedback (online) in an easy format. Polls can help to confirm or reject an approach also evolved from existing insights.
Survey
Surveys (online) provide great insights quickly and from large audiences. While surveys can combine both, quantitative and qualitative context, Free text answers for large audiences should be considers carefully. Good to obtain large amounts of quantitative data, but also to combine with qualitative with smaller audiences.
Usability study
A Usability study is an empirical evaluation, how useful a product or service is for end users. Usability testing mainly covers systematic observation in a standardized scenario. The SUS score (System Usability Scale) is a recommended format to obtain standardized results. Good to evaluate and quantity the usability and usefulness of a product or service.
Concept study
A Concept study is helpful to gain qualitative insights during the early stages of a product or service. Participants are asked to share their thoughts, feelings and needs towards a product or service.
Interviews
One-to-one interviewing is very helpful to gain in-depth qualitative insights. Real personal conversations provide a deep understanding of the whole context. In a safe and anonymized 1:1 scenario, also sensitive and hidden aspects can be outlined as well as feelings, or key quotes. Discussion can be deepened down to essential aspects by probing, clarifying and examples. Even body language and tone of voice can help to confirm key insights. Interviews are great to understand what people do, think, feel and say as well as to develop Personas by a follow-up evaluation.
Focus groups
While Interviews provide qualitative depth, Focus Groups provide qualitative breadth. Focus Groups are a great means to test aspects and views in a safe and interactive environment considering emotional and attitudinal aspects in addition. Focus Groups are great to obtain a top-level view on how people (really) experience a product or service.
Personas and Empathy Maps...
Enterprise Personas are ‘up to the minute’ fictional profiles that are representative of a particular group of people in your organization. We initially develop Enterprise Personas through a qualitative research with your associates. They detail the shared needs and roles that can help stakeholders, change makers and design teams really engage with the people they’re designing for and put themselves into their shoes.
Everything about a persona should be backed up by research and informed data, never be based on assumptions.
Personas work because they:
● Provide depth to help plan, develop and build more people-friendly solutions
● Create empathy for your audience and challenge preconceptions
● Focus design decisions on actual needs, not guesswork
● Bring the data to life, making insights more meaningful
● Outline different needs for different people in a diverse context (e.g. one and the same product is perceived differently by youngsters vs. elderly people)
Personas should highlight what's different between us so that we're designing for the widest possible group, not just our own world view.
Turning ideas into actions...
“It’s not about coming up with the ‘right’ idea, it’s about generating the broadest range of possibilities and turning them into actions.”
Suat Cicek
Idea generation is a place of infinite possibility. It’s how the team becomes comfortable with divergent creative thinking.
Go big, go wild. Be daft, be silly. The good news is there’s no such thing as a bad idea.
Go for it. The aim here is quantity, not quality.
Some times you have to go round the houses to end up in the right place.
Going broad and creating lots of New possibilities (diverging) is vital at this Topic stage, so it’s important to have fun, be
playful and keep the ideas flowing.
After diverging, there’ll be a time to converge (narrow down the ideas), but right now, let’s go BIG and BROAD.
Blue sky thinking can stop red tape following.
Limitless, divergent, open minded thinking helps teams move beyond the corporate norms to push innovation.
Brainstorming (or e-Storming when it’s done remotely) is core to this kind of thinking. Try starting by articulating the problems. This helps turn vague thoughts into rich seams.
Bringing it all together.
Once you’ve got a huge bunch of ideas, it’s time to move on to the ‘converging’ phase. This means taking on board all the ideas and focussing on those that have the greatest benefits, whilst meeting the objectives of the initiative.
A few simple steps to help the process:
• cluster similar responses and look for common themes
• create an important/difficulty graph to assess and priortise ideas
• discuss and seek opinions from the wider teams
• decide which idea(s) to take forward
Important: don’t rule out too many ideas too soon, or you’ll lose the ones that push innovation.