When UX intersects with poetry

Wayfinding your user interviews with art.

Everyone in design and research knows that there is no way we can get around user interviews. They are an integral part of the design cycle but let’s be honest, it is a tedious process.

How many times have you interviewed your users and felt elated with the rapport and felt like you finally got somewhere? And when you finally get those tough questions answered it feels good to check it off your to-do list and then move on to the next task of transcribing all the interviews.

TRANSCRIBING INTERVIEWS. OH NO!

Transcribing and analyzing interviews is like gold mining. If you are working in a team you might have one interviewer and one note-taker balancing the load and making sure you got everything down correctly. You might also have some great apps and tools to help with the audio file. Regardless, once all is said and done you will have to read through the interview and narrow down the gist of the conversation and bring forward the salient points.

Have you ever tried applying the skills of an artist to this process?

This art project below, was part of my Advanced Research class at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. With all our classes online I really wanted to find a way to balance the 3 hr long class. We keep talking about taking mental breaks, taking time off from staring at the screen, and figuring out ways to disconnect, right? So this project was a perfect way to blend the online learning environment with tactile hands on art.

The prompt for the assignment was, find a magazine, or an interview you have already conducted. Get a sharpie or pen. Create poetry out of what you see and read. You can enhance the words you see on paper with art. Of course a few students did not have any printed material at their disposal so I let them find an article online and follow the steps. We took 20 minutes for this while we were all on Zoom. We turned on some fun music and then just got into our assignment…. oops art!

Here is what some of us came up with.

What did we achieve with this art exercise?

1. First, they had to scan the material
2. They got to highlight what was important
3. Didn't get bogged down by minutiae

Most importantly this exercise makes it easier to look for the value in the words rather than the entire prose. This helps in identifying the overall message.

But the bigger win in this art activity was to actually get that respite from zoom fatigue, that mental break, without realizing you were still working towards your core curriculum.

Students weighed in after the activity was done -

I felt the activity was therapeutic in a sense and pretty different from typical activities. It’s quite simple but capable of provoking a meaningful message. In relation to UX, it has a similar pattern of ‘connecting dots’. Small/subtle things always connect in ways you don’t realize at first. You can synthesize or extract a key finding to understand the bigger picture! — Becca

During the 2020 Fall semester, I got to cross-teach a class with Fanny Krivoy’s Research Analysis and Process class at Pratt Institute, NY, my alma mater.

What I’d love to say is how important your art exercise was for the class for two reasons:

We had a task that is very analytical and right brain: to go through an interview or text and highlight the important points.

Your exercise forced us to approach this familiar task in a very different way and through a different lens:

- Some students approach by eliminating non-essential text first, others highlighted the essential first.

- Using art supplies added emphasis and boldness to the selections, elevating the message and the connection between the highlights.

- Gave us a whole new appreciation of an every day task by making it fresh

- It provided us with a strikingly visual end results, so in addition to feeling satisfied from accomplishing the scanning of the document, we also ended up with a beautiful visual piece.

And it was just fun! — Fanny

Here below are three student projects from Pratt.

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