Pat’s Point of View

I was recently reading UX Magazine (from the The Usability Professionals’ Association) and they had an article on cultural probes and another on moving with a magic thing, both new methods of user research.

Essentially cultural probes are a technique where you hand over control of the user research to the users themselves. Rather than observing them you provide them with a ‘kit’ with which they record their own behaviour and experiences. Typically this kit would include a diary, a digital camera etc. It’s like ‘scrapbooking’, where you write and stick stuff into a book to record what’s going on.

“Cultural probes are designed to prompt and elicit information from people about their lives and local culture.”

The original developers, William Gaver from the London Royal College of Art, suggest this technique is useful in non-work contexts or when more traditional techniques (such as lab testing or contextual enquiry) would either influence behaviour or be logistically difficult to perform.

The second technique, “moving with a magic thing” works according to a similar concept. It’s claimed to be useful when finding uses for new technology, by giving users the new thing (or a mock-up of it) and getting them to go away and discover uses for it. This beats a bunch of designers and engineers sitting around a table trying to think of how to use new technology, which is what most often happens. Why not employ the potential end-users to work out what it might be useful for?

“Users are met in their environment and given a ‘black box’ or a mock-up of a device. They are then told what functionality the device has and are asked to go about their life as they normally would…They are given a digital camera for a week and asked to take pictures of the situations where they would use the ‘magic thing’.”

Obviously this technique is most useful for technology-driven products/projects and only at the initial stages; different kinds of research would follow once the initial set of use scenarios have been collected.

I think these techniques are quite fascinating and could be valuable additions to the ol’ UX toolbox. I might have a use for the probe method soon, but the magic thing method might need to wait a little longer. It would be great to hear some feedback from people who have used these techniques and how successful they were.

Whilst the UPA don’t make the magazine articles available online—or at least not immediately—there’s plenty of stuff on the web. Gerry Gaffney has written quite a useful guide on using cultural probes, and Anu Kankainen has made her article on the moving with a magic thing technique available online.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Books, Design research, User experience. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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About the author

Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.