HUMAN-CENTERED PRODUCT PLANNING AND DESIGN:NATURALIST PHASE

1. NATURALIST PHASE

The purpose of the naturalist phase is gaining an understanding of stakeholders’ domains and tasks. This includes assessing the roles of individuals, their organizations, and the environment. Also of interest is identifying barriers to change and avenues for change.

The result of the naturalist phase is a formal description of stakeholders, their tasks, and their needs. This description can take many forms, ranging from text to graphics and from straightforward descriptions to theories and hypotheses regarding stakeholders’ behaviors.

This section elaborates and illustrates the process of developing descriptions of stakeholders, tasks, and needs. The descriptions resulting from the naturalist phase are the starting point for the marketing phase.

Identifying Stakeholders

Who are the stakeholders? This is the central question with which a human-centered design effort should be initiated. The answer to this question is not sufficient for success, but it is certainly necessary.

Stakeholder Populations

The key issue is identifying a set of people whose tasks, abilities, limitations, attitudes, and values are representative of the total population of interest. It is often necessary to sample multiple orga- nizations to gain this understanding of the overall population. An exception to this guideline occurs when the total population of stakeholders resides in a single organization.

Designers as Stakeholder Surrogates

Rather than explicitly identifying stakeholders, it is common for designers to think, perhaps only tacitly, that they understand stakeholders and, therefore, can act as their surrogates. To the extent that designers are former stakeholders, this approach has some merit. However, it is inherently limited from capturing the abilities, attitudes, and aspirations of current or potential stakeholders, as well as the current or potential impact of their organizations.

Elusive Stakeholders

It is often argued, particularly for advanced technology efforts, that the eventual stakeholders for the product or system of interest do not yet exist—there are no incumbent stakeholders. This is very

seldom true, because there are actually extremely few products and systems that are designed from scratch. Even when designing the initial spacecraft, much was drawn from previous experiences in aircraft and submarines.

Methods and Tools for Measurement

How does one identify stakeholders, and in particular, how does one determine their needs, prefer- ences, values, and so on? Observation is, of course, the necessary means. Initially, unstructured direct observations may be appropriate. Eventually, however, more formal means should be employed to assure unbiased, convincing results. Table 2 lists the methods and tools appropriate for answering these types of questions.

Magazines and Newspapers

To gain an initial perspective on what is important to a particular class of stakeholders or a particular industry, one should read what they read. Trade magazines and industry newspapers publish what interests their readers. One can capitalize on publishers’ insights and knowledge by studying articles for issues and concerns. For example, is cost or performance more important? Is risk assessment, or equivalent, mentioned frequently?

One should pay particular attention to advertisements because advertisers invest heavily in trying to understand customers’ needs, worries, and preferences. One can capitalize on advertisers’ invest- ments by studying the underlying messages and appeals in advertisements.

It is useful to create a file of articles, advertisements, brochures, and catalogs that appear to characterize the stakeholders of interest. Many of these types of materials can also be found on Internet websites. The contents of this file can be slowly accumulated over a period of many months before it is needed. This accumulation might be initiated in light of long-term plans to move in new directions. When these long-term plans become short-term plans, this file can be accessed, the various items juxtaposed, and an initial impression formed relatively quickly. For information available via Internet websites, this file can be readily updated when it is needed.

Databases

Many relatively inexpensive sources of information about stakeholders are available via online da- tabases. This is especially true for Internet-based information sources. With these sources, a wide variety of questions can be answered. How large is the population of stakeholders? How are they distributed, organizationally and geographically? What is the size of their incomes? How do they spend it?

Such databases are also likely to have information on the companies whose advertisements were identified in magazines and newspapers. What are their sales and profits? What are the patterns of growth? Many companies make such information readily available on their Internet websites.

By pursuing these questions, one may be able to find characteristics of the advertisements of interest that discriminate between good and poor sales growth and profits. Such characteristics might include leading-edge technology, low cost, and / or good service.

Questionnaires

Once magazines, newspapers, and databases are exhausted as sources of information, attention should shift to seeking more specific and targeted information. An inexpensive approach is to mail, e-mail, or otherwise distribute questionnaires to potential stakeholders to assess how they spend their time, what they perceive as their needs and preferences, and what factors influence their decisions.

Questions should be brief, have easily understandable responses, and be straightforward to answer. Multiple-choice questions or answers in terms of rating scales are much easier to answer than open- ended essay questions, even though the latter may provide more information.

Low return rate can be a problem with questionnaires. Incentives can help. For example, those who respond can be promised a complete set of the results. In one effort, an excellent response rate was obtained when a few randomly selected respondents were given tickets to Disney World.

Results from questionnaires can sometimes be frustrating. Not infrequently, analysis of the results leads to new questions that one wishes had been on the original questionnaire. These new questions can, however, provide the basis for a follow-up agenda.

Interviews

Talking with stakeholders directly is a rich source of information. This can be accomplished via telephone or even e-mail, but face to face is much better. The use of two interviewers can be inval- uable in enabling one person to maintain eye contact and the other to take notes. The use of two interviewers also later provides two interpretations of what was said.

Usually, interviewees thoroughly enjoy talking about their jobs and what types of products and systems would be useful. Often one is surprised by the degree of candor people exhibit. Consequently, interviewees usually do not like their comments tape-recorded.

It is helpful if interviewees have first filled out questionnaires, which can provide structure for the interview as they explain and discuss their answers. Questionnaires also ensure that they will have thought about the issues of concern prior to the interview. In the absence of a prior questionnaire, the interview should be carefully structured to avoid unproductive tangents. This structure should be explained to interviewees prior to beginning the interview.

Experts

People with specialized expertise in the domain of interest, the technology, and / or the market niche can be quite valuable. People who were formerly stakeholders within the population of interest tend to be particularly useful. These people can be accessed via e-mail or informal telephone calls (which are surprisingly successful), gathered together in invited workshops, and / or hired as consultants.

While experts’ knowledge can be essential, it is very important that the limitations of experts be understood. Despite the demeanor of many experts, very few experts know everything! Listen and filter carefully.

Further, it is very unlikely that one expert can cover a wide range of needs. Consider multiple experts. This is due not only to a need to get a good average opinion. It is due to the necessity to cover multiple domains of knowledge.

Summary

The success of all of the above methods and tools depends on one particular ability of designers— the ability to listen. During the naturalist phase, the goal is understanding stakeholders rather than convincing them of the merits of particular ideas or the cleverness of the designers. Designers will get plenty of time to talk and expound in later phases of the design process. At this point, however, success depends on listening.