Design Probes

Probes are based on user participation by means of self documentation (Mattelmaki 2006). Design probes in particular were introduced by Gaver et al (1999) in the form of design activity kits including cameras, maps, postcards and other materials that indulged user to answer design questions in a playful and creative manner.

Aim

The aim of probes is to collect data from users about a particular subject/topic in a creative manner which builds upon their experiences.

Outline

The steps involved in using the probes are variable since different kinds of studies use different probes which leads to different production time and usage (Esser 2020).

However broadly the steps can be divided into the following:

1. Understand the users

Understand what aspects of the narrative you can build upon using the probes. It’s very important to press on the topics which would lead to answers that can then feed into the design process, inspiring more ideas and giving the designers an insight into the user’s mind.

2. Designing the probes

Each set of probes contains different amount of activities that users have to go through. However it it’s very important to phrase the probes correctly and direct them appropriately.

3.Asking users use the probes

Probes can physical or digital and both of them require user to use them at their own time and convenience and return to the designer with the results.

4. Analysing the data

Probes result in a lot of quantitative data and analysing it maybe difficult sometimes if the group size is too big. Thematic analysis proves helpful in coming up with areas/pain points/ experiences/outcomes that overlap which can govern a bigger theme in the design project.

Examples

Comments

Having used probes in a project recently. I can definitely say that they’re great tools to get to know the psyche of your user. But probes might not be useful in every context. They need to be crafted carefully and deployed to the fright audience to the correct results. The insights provided by users help designers have a broader scope of the problem and also get a personal outlook from each user on their key problem areas. The other defining factor in why I love to develop probes is because they work great to inquire about user’s emotions about a particular task or an activity.

Application

According to Mattelmaki (2006) probes offer a link or prompts a recollection of a person, experience, story, place, feeling or atmosphere. It can be a particular item of memorabilia, or memory associated with it through a meaningful experience. The object can be a present from the last Christmas of childhood, when Santa’s beard was still real (cf. memorabilia, Pine & Gilmore 1999).

Probes can be used in a variety of participatory design projects where it's integral to understand details about the user’s experiences. Since probes are singling in nature, they can’t be done as a group exercise. They should be given to each user and the user should be choose when they want to interact with them.

Learning

It can be tricky to project the probes towards the right audience and design them in a way that it urges the user to think. In order to do that one first needs to really understand their topic at hand and learn what aspects of the subject can be used as hooks which can create an activity to collect data.

Time and Cost

Probes can range from zero cost (Digital) to medium cost (set of cameras, postcards etc). In general probes don’t cost much but they do take a considerable amount of time and research to create.

References

Mattelmäki, T. (2006) Design Probes, University of Art and Design: Helsinki.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: Cultural probes. Interactions, 6 (1), pp. 21-29.

Esser, P. (2020) Probes for Context Mapping – How to Design and Use Them [online], The Interaction Design Foundation, available: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/probes-for-context-mapping-how-to-design-and-use-them [accessed 15 Mar 2020].

Wallace, J., McCarthy, J., Wright, P.C., Olivier, P. (2013) ‘Making design probes work’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’13, Association for Computing Machinery: Paris, France, 3441–3450, available: https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466473 [accessed 15 Mar 2020]. .