Trends, patterns, and outliers

- [Instructor] In the days following the work session you'll need to dig into that overwhelming pile of data you've documented and begin to look for the most valuable information in it, I'll call this type of information trends, connections and outliers. This is what we are after. Let's talk about trends. You're looking through the results of the day and you're trying locate reoccurring thoughts and ideas. These can be inside one individual activity or they can appear across multiple activies. Usually both are going to happen. Trends are powerful because they reduce subjectivity in otherwords if enough people think it, say it, see it or feel it, it's much more likely to be trusted than if only a few do. Let's look at an example of a trend. Take a look at this Boston Box. Let's say this shows the results of an earlier activity we performed where we asked the client team to map out where different airline competitors fall in this spectrum and each color represents a different airline. And so if we look at the chart, we can see some similarities around. And then we see an overwhelmingly similar response to the orange competitor, this is a trend. Everyone feels like the orange competitor has a fairly sophisticated voice and a high end perception. So this is good we can trust this information much more than the rest of the data on this chart. You're also looking for connections in your results. Something that happened here has a direct relationship to something that happened over here. So if trends where easy to spot, connections are a little bit harder. But the deeper insights we find, the better design opportunities start to appear. It's a cause and effect scenario and as I'm sure you know so many pieces have to be in unison for a brand to really be at its full potential. So let's look at a possible connection. I'm going to call up two activities from our Wow case study for this. First lest look at the affinity message mapping that we did. Here let's say we determine that the bulk of the message samples that we've collected from Wow are about their happy attitude, their great fares and their solid customer service. Then let's consider our user profile Jack. One of Jack's complains and needs was that he was unprepared for the lack of comfort and the in-flight entertainment in his flight. So there is a connection here the lack of practical messaging shown in our affinity map and Jack who was missing information about upgrades and in-flight entertainment. So we found a nugget the lack of one thing caused this negative affect to happen somewhere else. That's great now we can fix it. The last thing we want to look at is outliers. We have talked about outliers already. They are these wonderful gold nuggets or these ugly pieces of coal. They are the unexpected, unanticipated answers that pop up whenever you do research activities. Someone voted in a way that was very different than everyone else they placed a competitor way off the map they filed a statement for a persona that made no sense at all. These kinds of things deserve a little bit of extra scrutiny from us. So we need to verify these outliers because they can be good or bad. Sometimes outliers can be different than everyone else's response because a participant didn't quite understand what you where asking them. And if you think you've spotted one of these you need to ask follow up questions to determine if the participant didn't quite have the expertise to answer. It does happen. Then you'll know that you can toss that outlier aside and that it's no use to us. But the other kind, the kind that says I understood exactly what you asked me to do and I just happened to have some expertise in this area, these can be sometimes the most interesting answers of the day. So let's look at our customer journey map. And if you remember this activity I asked our client to fill out the major brand interactions that a typical passenger has along their journey with Wow. And I provided most of what I thought the touch points and interactions where but I also allowed the client to write in their own. One of the client write ins landed in the entice column, and it said that Wow customers flight Wow because of the purple and it was voted down as in this was maybe a negative enticement. And I thought hmm that's interesting. Maybe it's just somebody's subjective opinion here about the purple color being a bad thing but I do wonder if there is anything more to that. Does purple offend some? Or maybe not offend just maybe turn some people off and would it entice others? And I mean if we do take a look at Wow they are not shy about using purple so I don't know. There could be something here, maybe nothing but there is something interesting to me about this that I might follow up and think just a little more about brand colors and how they are relevant to communicating to the audiences we are trying to reach. So as you complete this process, this mining for trend and connections and outliers you want to make notes of all your discoveries, photograph the activity sheets from your work session and document all these results. Because our next task is going to be to develop a documentation booklet that will share all of this valuable information with your team and the client.