Participatory Design: What is it? How it ACTUALLY works?
All You Need to Know About the New-Age Design Process – Participatory Design
Participatory design is essentially a design approach wherein all the stakeholders related to a product or service show active participation in the design process. This helps enhance the functionality of the product or service in question.
Design-led innovation is here to stay. From websites to mobile apps, from online gaming to virtual reality, the online space has unlimited potential for UI/UX design. Hence, it doesn’t come as a surprise that more and more web development agencies, as well as game development companies, are hiring elaborate in-house design teams to help them render an urban design that elevates user involvement in the most efficient manner possible!
That said, human-centered design is extensive and may not be tamable by a design team. After all, it isn’t always that the designers get to interact with the intended user base and understand their needs and preferences. In fact, in most cases, these interactions are often limited to the research phase right at the beginning of the design and development process and then at the far end of the process, when a project design is being tested.
Unfortunately, when idea generation is at its peak when the design is in the actual process when the professional designers create and recreate numerous iterations and brainstorm on each one of them, they have little to no insights pertaining to the needs of the target audience.
Participatory Design is a design process that aims at filling this gap, such that user involvement is consistent throughout the process. Not only does this save the design from a cultural or political disconnect between the product and the user, but it also ensures more favorable results during usability testing.
What is Participatory Design?
Participatory design, also known as co-operative design or co-design is one of the most effective design methods of the present-day era, wherein all stakeholders, including but not limited to employees, partners, customers, citizens, and end users, design projects in a collective manner. This design process ensures that the end result is far more likable as well as usable, as compared to when a product or service was designed by dedicated design teams.
This process of cooperative design comprises techniques that are functional to both – initial discovery as well as subsequent ideation.
One of the most imperative benefits of conducting a participatory design session is the ability to extract new information and insights from end-users about their past experiences and future expectations of the product or service in question.
As one may assume, the participatory design tradition helps bring professional designers much closer to their target audience, not just with respect to graphic design or software design, but also in terms of their overall design thinking.
Simply put, the co-design process can prove to be the foundation of a design that is based on honest data and can therefore give way to the creation of entire systems that are far more acceptable and useful for the target groups than any other designs.
What is NOT Participatory Design?
It is easy to assume that the participatory design process is a simple way of getting the end users to lead the design process. However, the truth remains that this is a consultative design process, whereby the role of the end users is confined to giving their inputs and sharing their insights. The actual design has to be undertaken by the professional designers themselves, and there are no two ways about it!
It is also important to understand that cooperative design is not a rigidly defined process but a loose creative process that is aimed at enabling more efficient usability research.
Yet another aspect to remember is that participatory design is an approach, one of many, and is not the holy grail that promises a successful final outcome.
Participatory Design Exercises
Participatory Design Exercises, also known as Participatory Design Sessions, as the name suggests, are simple exercises wherein the designers create simple yet effective ways for the end users to curate the mockup designs for products or software that they would look forward to using.
Of course, their design ideas need to be supported by a valid explanation as to why it makes sense for them, and how the particular design would enhance the usability of the product or feature for them.
During each session, closely observing the participants, listening to and understanding their needs and preferences from a said product or service, and gathering insights into their thought processes, are some aspects that can help the designers and researchers learn a lot more about their target audiences as compared to asking them to fill out a questionnaire.
Ideal Situations for a Participatory Design Session
Below are the circumstances, when it is the most fruitful to conduct participatory design sessions for the stakeholders involved with a particular project –
In case when designers need to gain a better understanding of the user involvement with a specific problem or discipline
In case when designers think that there is a parity between what users think they do with a software or app, and what they actually do
In case when the designers feel a stong disconnect with the intended user base
Tools for Participatory Design Exercises
At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, “A participatory design session sounds great! I want to conduct one, but which tools do I need?”
When it comes to the tools and design methods you can use in participatory design sessions, nothing is set in stone.
If you are working on developing a product or an environment, you might want to use wooden bricks, Legos, plasticine, pieces of rope, maps, and so on. You can even use post-it notes successfully and in a variety of different ways.
One of the great things about participatory design exercises is that the only limitation when it comes to the tools used is your imagination.
If you are designing software, you might decide to stick to pen and paper. (Or a whiteboard!) You could create blank versions of different device screens and ask participants to draw out the UI.
You could provide the participants with cut-out icons and boxes. They can arrange them to their liking and according to their needs – explaining why they put something in one place instead of the other.
By letting the participants show us what matters to them, as opposed to telling us, we are getting more specific and more honest data out of the session.
Love Letter/Breakup Letter Activity for a participatory design
Rather than asking people what they like or don’t like about a service or brand, this method provides insight into customers’ perceptions by eliciting feelings of appreciation, frustration, or aversion through writing a hypothetical love letter or breakup letter directed at the service or organization.
We can draw on the content and tone of the letter, as well as body language when members read it aloud, to build empathy and discover which experiences will be most likely to create, maintain, or harm brand loyalty as we design potential solutions.
Empathy Collage in participatory design
Visual associations allow people to reframe their perspective and make potentially abstract connections between their experiences with a product or service. This activity helps customers’ express their experiences and needs in a way words can sometimes fail to describe.
Participants are always placed at the center of the collage, which allows us to understand how they conceive of their own role in their interactions with the organization.
Magic Screen Activity in participatory design
People can often identify hidden opportunities and potential design value through a co-creation process. Providing participants with materials that allow them to engage in a hands-on “making” activity provides us with a sense for what features or functionality may be most important (or least important), and often reveals insights about customers’ mental model for interactions.
Result:
This work resulted in a personalized, anticipatory experience that included certain tools and content identified by customers as higher priority than the organization’s stakeholders and designers expected. In our workshop, these customers described what they wanted in familiar terms.
However, seeing how they actually built and sketched imaginary solutions showed us that many assumptions about their priorities were incorrect, once we saw what they created in participatory design sessions. Giving customers an opportunity to design a solution, rather than just asking them to talk about it, provided that important nuance.
We might have designed an experience that was highly streamlined and intuitive without their help, but the benefit of having customers co-design the experience was that we ended up focusing on more than just an intuitive experience, focusing instead on one provides personalized, proactive suggestions instead of building a more general home for commonly useful content.
[see Case Study 1 photos]
Case Study 1
Case Study 1
Building empathy and understanding within a large fleet management company
A number of different approaches were applied for a fleet management company to uncover unmet needs and provide an actionable design roadmap for fleet management app features moving forward.
Role of Participatory Design:
Journey Mapping: Customers can map out their current experiences, including pain points, frustrations, challenges, and areas for opportunity, in a way we sometimes can’t even with plenty of ethnographic research.
We find that we get richer information by extracting it within the context of an entire experience, rather than asking about the issues as a standalone exercise.
Lensed Brainstorming: Customers can often generate a lot of great ideas in a short time. To inspire ideas, we use lenses: words representing concepts or ideas that help us look at a problem or scenario in a different way.
Magic Button: Think of the Staples Easy Button or a magic wand. The Magic Button activity invites customers to imagine the best experience imaginable. In order to capture these insights, we ask questions like, “What would a magic button do?”
Result:
We identified key challenges and insights that had gone uncovered by prior research, and integrated those findings into a strategic roadmap for the client’s mobile app, online platform, and marketing solutions.
Seeing customer’s reactions and ideas firsthand built empathy among stakeholders and helped guide the product roadmap with the customer’s voice in mind.
[see Case Study 2 photos]
Case Study 2
Case Study 2
Case Study 2
Tackling a stubborn challenge through co-design with Muskegon Family Care
Three of our designers partnered with Muskegon Family Care, a federally qualified health center, to tackle the high rates of patient no-shows and low patient engagement. We hypothesized that if we could understand what patients found valuable in their clinical visits, identify the barriers that kept patients from the visits, and improve the experience of the patient-clinician interaction, then both clinicians and patients would find the appointments more valuable. This, in its turn, would reduce the no-show rate.
Role of Participatory Design:
Circles of Me: Rather than simply asking people what is important to them, this method facilitates participants through visually capturing their needs and desires in a hierarchical manner. Fashioned as a bullseye, in the innermost circle participants include things and relationships they value the most.
In the subsequent circles, participants put other people/things/relationships important to them in descending order. This method is able to identify what participants really value, helping us better understand their needs and desires in order to design with them.
Role-playing: Based on the work of the researcher and educator Vivian Paley, this exercise helps build empathy by creating a shared understanding of both the patient’s and clinician’s experience. While participants acted out their stories to illustrate their solutions, this also helped shape the ideal care center experience.
Rapid Prototyping: Rapid prototyping is a quick way to get a sense of how a solution might work in the real world by using simple supplies such as paper, Playdough, pipe cleaners, Legos, and other basic supplies.
By rapidly prototyping solutions, participants and designers have a chance to critique the ideas and quickly make changes without spending a lot of time and energy making something perfect before evaluating it.
Round Robin: This activity allows ideas to evolve as they are passed from person to person. This strengthens ideas and creates holistic solutions by incorporating multiple viewpoints. After participants created their prototypes in groups, they moved through a series of rotations where they were prompted to add their own knowledge and suggestions to each of the prototypes
Result:
Participatory design opened the door to rich conversations around the unmet needs hindering face-to-face clinical appointments. Through our collaborative workshop with clinicians, patients, and staff members we learned how critical personal connection is for this audience and the roles shame and financial hardship play in scheduling appointments.
This level of understanding would not have been possible without bringing diverse stakeholders together in an environment that facilitated their creative thinking. By the end of the two-day collaboration, the group of patients, clinicians, care center staff, and designers created two solutions to the patient no-show challenge as well as a strategic implementation plan.
This plan guides the clinic through several steps: low-risk pilots, incorporating later iterations based on results of the evaluation, facilitating final implementation within the clinic, and finally, measuring success.
[see Case Study 3 photos]
Case Study 3
Case Study 3
Helping Behavioral Health Innovators empower the disenfranchised
Behavioral Health Innovators (BHI) sought to create a series of co-design workshops by partnering with high school students in recovery from addiction.
Mad*Pow worked closely with these students to understand and document the underlying causes of their substance abuse, map their journeys through addiction and recovery, and facilitate the creation of several prototypes of interventions that could help other young adults.
Role of Participatory Design:
Super Powers: This is an ice-breaking collaborative activity where participants are invited to share their imagined super powers as a way to introduce themselves. Instead of simply stating they are a student or a parent, they created their introduction using the Super Power cards.
This allows the group to understand their strengths, especially when considering how to work with other group members, and how to apply any insights made outside of the workshop.
Opportunities Identification: In this activity, participants are prompted to use journey maps to think about opportunities, or the situations where they feel like things might have gone differently. Participants can think of the different opportunities at every stage of their journey, such as situations where they could have benefited from talking to a friend, or an adult who knows them well, who could have offered help, but didn’t.
Result:
We used collaborative activities to facilitate co-design with the students. These activities revealed an unexpected depth of the problem that simple quantitative data or structured interviews simply wouldn’t have revealed.
We discovered concern over lack of social support, and no belief that they could positively affect their futures. In behavior intervention design, this determinant is called self-efficacy. In the vernacular, we call it hope.
Through our collaboration with students, our lived experience experts, we were able to learn about the paths to addiction that result from deeper and more complex issues, and the solutions that the students felt most connected to. Prototypes created in this co-design workshop addressed social needs and finding new ways to connect youth at risk for addiction, or those recovering from addiction, with other sober teens or adults.
[see Case Study 4 photos]
Case Study 4
Case Study 4
In sum:
Involving the people we’re serving through design as participants in the process helps ensure that our solution addresses their life holistically. It makes sure we don’t reduce people to discrete behaviors separated from the context of their lives, communities, aspirations, or value structures. This type of approach allows us to address root causes of the problems rather than symptoms, and, therefore, leads to better experiences & outcomes.
People can often identify hidden opportunities and potential design value through a co-creation process. Viewing participants as subject matter experts — involving them in the process of co-creation — we can start to see their needs differently and understand how our solutions fit into the bigger context of their lives.
