Fishbird

This is part 2 of my argument that focus groups with fun activities can and do yield useful results.

We consider the case of civic engagement: City of San Jose uses Budget Games to get residents to give feedback on annual budget proposals. Negotiations with play money about real proposals gets genuine feedback from 150 people during a single Saturday morning. Budget Games, organized by Every Voice Engaged and Innovation Games®, in conjunction with the City of San Jose’s staff, aided by volunteer facilitators and observers, have been the successful alternative for 3 years to traditional methods for getting public feedback about municipal budget proposals.

The same general technique that we show here can be used to help make decisions about new product features in a corporate setting, and equally well for other decisions where there are too many choices, not all of which require the same amount of resources or effort. And, other related playful techniques are useful for getting authentic feedback from a small group.

As mentioned in the previous post, the role of the moderator of a focus group changes when we make the group about interacting with other players, and not with the moderator. For Budget Games, a moderator at each table tracks which citizen, representing which neighborhood, led the effort to fund the library proposal or the additional police officers. The observer at each table took notes on arguments put forward for or against each proposal, and who supported those arguments. This way the organizers (other trained facilitators) can analyze the outcomes (which proposals were funded by which tables – the “WHAT”), as well as the rationale for those outcomes (the WHY). Moderators for this event come from user experience research, agile software development, project management and design backgrounds.

Facilitators & Observers for San Jose Budget Games 2013

For more about the Budget Games in San Jose, see the articles in Business Week  from August 2012 and Financial Times from November 2012. For reflections on being a facilitator at this event from others, see posts by Steve Rogalsky  and Wil.

I’ve made this case a number of times, especially as I train people in how to incorporate games, including Innovation Games®, in a program of user research.

User experience professionals need to get clear about what’s wrong about focus groups, and what’s so attractive about them. The March (2013) BayCHI monthly program abstract ends with the words, “why you should never, ever hold a focus group.”  Now we’ve got a timely discussion.

Later this week, I’ll be adding additional information about what kinds of useful results you can expect to get from a focus group that uses activities (vs one that follows a script narrowly), how these newer kinds of focus groups are changing the face of civic engagement, what kinds of questions will get useful answers, and how to recruit people to provide meaningful answers.

Poster announcing Course 27 at CHI2010

What can you do in 90 minutes to introduce a professional audience to the set of practices which are Innovation Games®? Quite a bit!  But not all of what we had planned.

The course announcement

Here’s what people saw on the web when they considered whether to enroll in this course “Innovation Games® for User Research in an Agile Environment”, which competed against about 10 other sessions in the same time slot.

This course describes a set of qualitative research methods that will be attractive to user researchers, customer satisfaction specialists, Chief Happiness Officers, marketing professionals, among others. People who participate on Agile teams and those who are considering making a change to Agile practices will enjoy learning new techniques that fit into an Agile framework. Designers, engineers, and others with limited research background are welcome to join in the fun. (more…)

Long before I became an advocate and trained facilitator of Innovation Games®, I was an enthusiastic practitioner of other design games and playful exercises.  (more…)

My spoken French is more or less limited to menu items and courtesy phrases.  I’m better at comprehension, but unable to express myself to my own satisfaction in a business setting.  One of the challenges of the managing the tutorial at WIF 2008, was that this session was held in Limoges, France.

As a tutorial leader, I might have been out of luck, but I was ably assisted by two professional interpreters.  In a room of about 35 people, I estimate that there were 6-8 French speakers; the remainder were willing to work in English.  Among them were native speakers of perhaps 4-5 additional languages, but English was the lingua franca for most.

After a brief introduction about design games in the product development process, and Innovation Games® in particular, we broke into groups to create “Product Boxes.”  I said, but perhaps not forcefully enough, that people could work alone or in small groups.  When Product Box starts, people dig into the materials and start making their sketches and notes.  They probably weren’t paying close attention to me (nor, in this case, the interpreter).

In the midst of the game play one participant approached me through the interpreter, identifying himself as a game designer.  He announced that “teams are the enemy of freedom.”  Either this was very deep and philosophical statement, or there was a simpler interpretation that I was overlooking.  Asking for clarification, I realized that he didn’t want to work with the people he happened to share a table and language community with:  he wanted to create on his own.

I encouraged him to go ahead and work solo.  Although this exchange prevented him from completing the full design he had envisioned, he did realize at least one good idea as shown in this photo

The ideas fly freely (into?) out of the head!

Are teams the enemy of freedom?  I might agree that teams constrain individual freedom, but I’m also a subscriber to the aphorism “many hands make light work” (there must be French for this one!).  There’s more to say about games as focused toward individuals, groups or teams, but I’ll save that for another occasion.