What does the research tell us?

Researchers in the field of wearable technology follow many types of research practices. When you start to plan and develop your wearables, you will find that you may choose a path that works for you. You may want to learn about qualitative methods. This involves collecting first-hand (primary research) data – the stories and the feelings and thoughts to create improved versions of what we are developing. I’m often asked the following by students when I teach about technology and designing for people:

• How do I know what the right design is?
• How can I design something they need?
• When we make something, how do I know if people will use it?

And so on… My answer is typically the same – we get these answers from speaking to people. We don’t know the answers, we don’t have the perspective of everyone who may use what we make, and we want to understand why someone has a particular need – even if they don’t know it yet. All these questions, and many more, can be answered by speaking with people. As Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of Nielson Norman Group, states, “Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.” We will discuss ways to do this and how to use engagement tools in Chapter 11, Innovating with a Human-Centered Design Process.

As you design your wearables, keep in mind that qualitative data will give you the stories that you need to be able to develop with success. Along the way, you may follow an ethnographic (Gobo, G., Marciniak, L.T., 2011) approach. Primarily, this involves studying people, their behaviors, their social interactions, and similar.

As Hillman Curtis states, “The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize, and glean insights that enable him or her to make the invisible visible.”

This is typically done in their environment, where they study people in context. It is a great way to begin to understand the people you want to design for. This way, you can begin to understand their story, goals, and context.

Using research methods to acquire knowledge

Fieldwork, or field studies, is a generic term for you going into “the field” – the environment where the people you are designing for are located. These studies are not done in a lab or in unnatural settings.

I have also used “in-the-wild” studies to describe some of the research I have done. This is when a participant uses the wearable as part of their daily routine. You may or may not be present for this:

• Non-participant observation: You observe people from a distance, without interacting with them. This allows you to gain information and not disturb how people will act naturally in their environment.
• Participant observation: This involves you establishing a relationship with the person or people you are observing. You typically stay for a set period in their natural environment. Here, you can interact with them and participate in their everyday habits.
• Passive observation: Generally, this method involves shadowing the people you are concerned with. You won’t interact with them or interfere in their normal interactions. Documentation is important and can involve video, photography, note-taking, audio recording, and drawings. This method allows you to focus on them fully and maintain your outsider perspective. Also, even though you are not interacting with them directly, often, people are still very conscious or aware of your presence, so their behavior may be altered. This can also depend on what you are observing. It might take several visits or a long time observing to lessen this happening.
• Interviews: Interviews are a great follow-on from observation. Speaking to people after observing them can provide additional insights. It provides information about what they are doing and why they are doing it and fills in details on aspects that you weren’t able to fully capture or observe. It may offer you more insights if you can interview them in the same location where the observation took place.
• Auto-ethnographic approach: For certain wearable items you make, you may want to be the person testing them. It could be that you have a need for the wearable you are making. If so, you can follow an auto-ethnographic approach. This is a research method and methodology that uses the researcher’s personal experience as data to describe, analyze, and understand cultural experience (C Ellis, TE Adams, AP Bochner, 2011). When I followed this method, I took huge amounts of field notes. I’ll cover this more in Chapter 11, Innovating with a Human-Centered Design Process.
• Research diaries: A research diary is a great way to protect the work you do in the field. You don’t want to forget everything you’ve been observing or listening to. If I challenge you to tell me what you said in an earlier conversation, you will rarely remember the majority of what was said. It’s only until you use a diary of some description that you can begin to form an accurate picture of what happened – not your interpretation of it. Whether they are called diaries, log books, journals, field notes, or lab books, some version of this type of “external memory” has been used by researchers in many disciplines to record their daily observations in the field (Altrichter, H. and Holly, M.L., 2005).

What can people tell us?

These research methods can be very useful for designing wearable technology. This is not an exhaustive list, and I would recommend that you follow up on these concepts. Speaking to people is one of the best ways to answer your questions and set you on your developing journey. Instead of asking what the research tells us, we may ask, what can people tell us?

When using these methods and others, it is especially important to follow and be aware of the ethical and cultural considerations. This brings us to the next section.