Discovery and Synthesis

Taranpreet Singh
2 min readJan 28, 2021
Design: Cultural Probe

William W. Gaver’s Cultural Probes

We have always learned that the first step in the design process is empathy (to empathize). Empathy is our ability to see the world through other people’s eyes, to see what they see, feel what they feel, and experience things as they do. Of course, none of us can fully experience things the way someone else does, but we can attempt to get as close as possible, and we do this by putting aside our own preconceived ideas and choosing to understand the ideas, thoughts, and needs of others instead.

In Design Thinking, Empathy is, as explained in IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for”. It involves learning about the difficulties people face, as well as uncovering their latent needs and desires in order to explain their behaviors. To do so, we need to have an understanding of the people’s environment, as well as their roles in and interactions with their environment.

But, after reading William W. Gaver’s, Design: Cultural Probes, I personally think it’s the better option than empathy! As in empathy, you try to understand the problems and difficulties people face, whereas, in cultural probes, they provide a way of gathering information about people and their activities. Unlike direct observation (like usability testing or traditional field studies), the technique allows users to self-report.

Information gathered from cultural probes is particularly useful early in the design process, just like empathy.

Nielsen Normal Group’s When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

This article reminds me of one of the article by UX collective that I read on medium. This article mentioned one excellent tool — a quiz by User Interviews to find out how to choose the right UX Research Method.

My Takeaways:

There are a few different things to consider when you are deciding which research methods you and your team are going to use. It is vital to discuss within your team what it is that you need to find out. That will determine whether you will use behavioral or attitudinal/ qualitative or quantitative research methods.

It is vital to conduct thorough user research with the given methods to design a great user experience. It allows us to understand our target audience while diving deep beneath the surface to determine our users’ needs rather than what we think they want.

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