Visualising User Reseach

A review of the article Communicating through Visualisations: Service Designers on Visualising User Research

This paper investigates how and why service designers use visualisation techniques to communicate user research. It also attempts to categorise the techniques based on the intended recipient. As an example, for internal purposes post it notes and rough sketches can be used to visualise ideas and user research. In contrast when communicating with stakeholders, and specifically the client, the output is normally much more aesthetically pleasing and only relevant information is presented in a summarised form. To gather evidence for the paper, the author interviewed 14 service designers.

There is an interesting statement that claims visualisations have received little interest by the academic service design community. This is quite surprising because I would have thought that academics would create service design concepts and theory, and therefore the visualisation tools. From my experience in engineering and management, it is academics who create the concepts and theory behind the subjects and professionals in industry use and develop them.

I would at least expect academics and professionals to collaborate when developing theory, techniques or even the service design language. A divide between academic and professional service designers has been discussed in the paper Beyond the experience - In search of an operative paradigm for the industrialisation of services.

Making services tangible by visualising is cited as the main goal of the visualisation techniques. A similar point was also mentioned in the Spicing up User Journeys paper.

The author thought that the goals for visualisation can be further broken down into three main objectives:

1. Communication within the design team
2. Communication with ones memory
3. Communication with stakeholders outside of the design team

As I’m currently working on a service design project I completely agree with these objectives. I can particularly relate to numbers 2 and 3. I performed a lot of user research, interviews, questionnaires etc and visualising the information and insights has been important in actually remembering what I had done, who I had interviewed and the insights and conclusions gathered from the research. The visualisations such as stakeholder maps, user journeys and personas where really helpful when explaining my progress to colleagues and tutors.

Coming from a technical and non creative background it was also useful to learn about when and for what purpose the various visualisation techniques are used. All of the tools were new to me so reading this paper was very insightful.