Empiricism and design. The Indiana Jones hat effect.

 

Hi there, welcome back!

The semester is finally over and that means that I can have some time to myself. Say what you will about teaching, but you can never anticipate the amount of paperwork attached to giving lectures and grading papers.

One thing I absolutely, positively LOVE about teaching though, is the constant opportunity to chat with people from all sorts of backgrounds that are very well versed in different topics. It's also an amazing chance to gauge what the next generation feels about certain topics and how the roles they envision themselves filling when joining the workforce.

Couple that with the fact that I never stopped doing design work on the side and we are left with some very interesting occasions for insights that I'm super excited to share with you all!

First, let's set the stage:

I do most of my in-city traveling using the public transport system, which means that I do a lot of walking on very inhospitable weather. I'm mainly speaking about the blazing hot sun we get here ninety percent of the year. 

This prompted me to get a hat to keep my head and temper cool during those treks. Since I wanted to keep my hair neatly combed when I got to my destination, rather than getting a regular cap or a bucket hat, I decided to get a proper hat that sat on my eyebrow line. I chose an Indiana Jones looking hat or cordovan hat.

One day as I was arriving at the school grounds, one of my colleagues remarked that with that hat and the big backpack I was wearing I looked like a field biologist mid-expedition. At the moment I didn't think much about it since I was just happy to get inside an air conditioned building. But as the day went by, I kept going back to that remark and realized that I actually liked the sound of it it very much.

It's just a very cool looking image...

The implications of Field Work:

Empiricism is not a word that we get to use often. I mostly use it to describe how I got a hold of my knowledge regarding beer types and flavors. But given how technology is evolving, it's a word I believe should be more present in our every day lexicon.

With the rise of AI and LLM's prevalence in our daily lives, we as humans keep putting a great deal of importance on data and use it to base practically every decision that we make. In an effort to deliver results quickly we have slowly pushed out the manual gathering of said data relegating it to more autonomous methods of collection.

Speaking from a design perspective, no matter if it's graphic, industrial or experience design, it's super important that even with all the data we get from these studies, surveys and materials, we still take time to go out and actually interface with our target audience, customers and users.

Going out and seeing how they interact with similar products can give us a lot of tangential data about their actual needs. Understanding when and where they use our products will give us a better understanding of the headspace they're in when opening our apps or services and the amount of time and attention they can allocate during a session. Quoting Frank Herbert's Dune: "A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it."

 Experience: The best complement for Data

In a previous post, I mentioned how one of my first approaches to UX design was from a designer who made it a part of his design process to spend time analyzing how the installers of the product, not the customer, would make use of it.

In that same spirit, I remember my father was once commissioned to create the training manuals meant for truck delivery drivers for a beverage company. Initially he was given a bunch of material that detailed branding guidelines, handling of the merchandise, clearances for unloading boxes and how and where to stack them within the stores among other technical details. My dad was very fond of conversing with anyone that would lend him an ear, so eventually he found himself chatting with some of the delivery drivers stationed at the manufacturing plant.

He started discussing some of the guidelines he had received because he wanted to find out how the drivers referred to the delivery stages in hopes of shaping the language to be more to their liking. What he found out instead, was that the guidelines could barely ever be followed precisely because basically every element present in the guidelines were modeled after large super markets and could not be adapted to the actual majority of corner shops and mom & pop stores that made up for the majority of customers. This caused rookie drivers to have a very hard time putting their knowledge to use.

Long story short, my dad spent around a month touring with different delivery drivers and adapting what he learned from actually visiting the locations and customers to the training material. As far as I know, that company uses the processes he wrote down to train their drivers to this day.

Mixing data with some outside experience can do wonders

So, should you get yourself a hat too?

Hats look pretty cool so I'll never advise against that!

Headgear aside, designers' main task is not only to make things more usable and pretty. We are meant to make things more "human". We can see this in many of the tools and aides we create for a workflow: Branding assets related to a mission, user journeys and personas along with workshops and exercises, all meant to keep people in the minds of every person involved in creating something.

Designers need to tap into their rebellious side every once in a while and challenge their business objectives from outside the business perspective. Nothing breaks notions and perceptions as perfectly as experiencing reality for a couple of minutes. So don't rely on static data alone, do your best to actually try and experience what you're researching out in the wild!

I may have directed this paragraph to designers, but I really believe the principle holds true for anyone.

Besides, "Field worktitle" sounds a lot cooler than "worktitle" by itself!

I hope my ramblings provide some new insight you can use on your own endeavors or at least provided you with some minutes of entertainment.

Never stop creating!