Module 2
Page 10 of 11

Task 2: Using stimulus materials to drive design

This task is about bringing designed stimulus materials into research in order to find out user’s reactions to them. This relates to our section on Research methods: from interviews to design stimulus. Ideally you should do this on a working real-life project or product, but if you aren’t in a position to, you should spend 5 minutes before starting coming up with a plausible fictional project to use. You could use the same project as from Task 1 of this module, and consider this the next phase of research.

Step-by-step
  1. As a group, agree your research questions (Refer back to the section on these if necessary). If you are following on from Task 1 of this module, review your research questions to see if they are still appropriate.
  2. Decide what you think would be a useful stimulus to bring into an interview to help answer those questions. In real life this might be a working prototype but for the purposes of this exercise it may be easier to do something on paper, a representation of your tool or technology, for example.
  3. Design and make this stimulus and think through how the stimulus would be introduced to the research participant.
  4. If you can, use the stimulus in a mock interview with a participant who you think can help answer the research questions. As in Task 1, if you aren’t able to do this, role-play the scenario with someone in the group. Take field notes (see our section on this) and save them for later.
  5. As a group, reflect on the following questions. Did the stimulus make a difference to the kind of responses you got? What did you learn from this activity? Was anything surprising? Or particularly challenging? What would you do differently if you were to do this again?