Crowd-Driven Innovation: Consumer Review Needfinding Spring 2013
In-Class Activity: Consumer Review Needfinding
objectives
User data helps designers make well-informed decisions that can influence product adoption. Online data collection does not (and should not) replace face-to-face data gathering methods, but it can provide an additional research method to add to your tool belt. For this activity, you will gather and synthesize information from an online review site to understand customer needs/desires about a particular business venue.
The goal is to be able to:
1) Mine social media sites for needs/desires
2) Analyze large amounts of social media data.
overview
needfinding → ideating → prototyping → pitching
local contexts
Use review sites to investigate customers needs and desires for a prominent organization in your city. Choose one of the following:
- reviews of Nearby Ikea on Yelp.com
- reviews of Local Restaurant on UrbanSpoon.com
- reviews of Local Courtyard Marriott on Hotels.com
instructions
- Get into a group of 3 or 4 students and choose one of the contexts above.
- Create a Google doc to share with your teammates.
- Everyone (individually) collect and label interesting quotes from the review site.
- Identify and organize the quotes according recurring themes. The organizational scheme is up to you.
- Create a short summary of good/bad aspects of the experience and potential design opportunities.
reflection
Questions for discussion:
- What are your overall thoughts about this research method?
- What does this method offer compared to other need finding practices? (i.e. interviewing? surveys?)
- How might you use this practice to better understand users to inform design decisions?
- What was challenging about this activity?
- How would you improve this activity?
