Ed Boyden is a professor at the MIT Media Lab, and he seems to spend a lot of time thinking about... thinking. I learned about his blog when he recently published a notable post on the untapped value of using the brainpower of students to solve real world problems, rather than hypothetical example problems. I highly recommend you read it, but that's not really the point of what I am focusing on here.
What I am focusing on relates to a post from last year titled How To Think - Managing brain resources in the age of complexity. In brief, it discusses ten rules for how to organize information, and you should read it before continuing here so you'll know what I'm talking about.
I was struck by a couple of things in Boyden's article. First, who has the time and motivation to "document everything obsessively"? It seemed like his rules were unrealistic and time-consuming. The second thing that struck me was that while some of these rules are impractical for living by, they make a lot of sense in the context of conducting user research, most notably:
- Synthesize new ideas constantly - I think this one is self-explanatory
- Learn how to learn (rapidly) - This one too
- Work backward from your goal - Design research should focus on producing actionable results to inform design. Keeping this in-mind will make the research analysis process more efficient
- Make contingency maps - We call them task flows
- Write up best-practices protocols - We call this task analysis
- Compose conversation summaries - We call this interviewing
In fact, this list might be read like a series of guidelines for conducting design research.
Boyden provides some technical recommendations for documenting conversations as well (Interesting...and certainly obsessive.):
"I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I've conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop."
