Cognitive data for designers
Integrating cognitive user data in journey maps - Explorations towards designer affinity
PROJECT TAGS
Research for design | Process design
PROJECT DETAILS
TU Delft - graduation project
Individual
20 weeks
ROLE
Design Research, User Research, Process Design, Rapid Prototyping, Project and Stakeholder Management
DELIVERABLE
Research outcomes and report
Overview
With this project, I aim to
Address the challenge of effectively using cognitive user data in design.
Understand barriers to integrating this data into design workflows.
Explore solutions to make cognitive data more accessible.
Identifies key barriers to incorporation from the designer's perspective.
Propose methods for seamless integration of cognitive data into design decisions through user journey mapping.
RESEARCH vision
To explore designers' affinity for integrating cognitive user data into their workflows.
Understanding Cognitive Data in Design
To understand the context, I conducted a user research and literature research (see Section Evidence). Through this, I identified and understood the challenges of this problem.
Challenges identified
Designer Struggles
Understanding Cognitive Data
Designers have varying levels of understanding of cognitive data.
Visualising Observations
Many struggle to visualize observations from qualitative data.
Lack of time
Limited time is allocated for integrating cognitive data into their work.
Revisiting Data
Revisiting and reusing data is challenging due to poor documentation.
Differing Project Priorities
User research often prioritizes usability over deeper (explicit) cognitive insights.
Data Complexity
Varying typologies and granularities of data
Cognitive data varies depending on the collection method, ranging from general behavior patterns to detailed thought processes.
Lack of Standard Visualisation Form
There is no standard format for presenting user data in a cohesive way for designers.
Exploring Designer's Affinity
Designer's affinity to cognitive data - focusing on aspects that impact posterity, comprehension and reliability.
Owing to the complexity of cognitive data and the limited time that the project afforded, I narrowed down my scope and focus to exploring designer's affinity to cognitive data. Through this, I aimed to understand the aspects that makes cognitive user data more approachable by designers. Focus will be on posterity to help revisit data, comprehension to improve understanding and reliability of data.
Probe design
Two probes were created to test designer's affinity:
an Interactive Map and a Static Map
Probes were designed to simulate use cases for designers based on the following requirements. Both show a synthesized user journey of a pilot flying a transatlantic flight, integrating observations and varying levels of cognitive data from an EEG—from raw to processed.
Requirements
Presenting Integrated User Journey
The goal is to present designers with an integrated user journey map (combining cognitive data and observations in user journey maps), IUJM in short, to study how they interact with it.
Understanding Posterity
Inquiry into designer's take on data posterity needs to be conducted with respected to cognitive data in IUJMs.
Understanding Comprehension
Varying abstractions of data needs to be depicted in the IUJM to understand the level that designers have most affinity to.
Understanding Presentation Preferences
Different ways of information display needs to be presented to understand preference of designers to ensure that the IUJMs are used in long term.
Understanding Reliability
The ability of the IUJM to establish trust in information needs to be studied.
