Its use in marketing has mainly been to assess feelings towards brands and products. The method has been well used to conduct qualitative marketing research for at least 40 years. A Brief History Of Projective TechniquesĬollaging is not new. You honestly don’t know what you will learn from each participant’s collage. The wonderful thing about this method is that participants might reveal stories that prompt a line of questioning about a topic that you never expected to explore (as we’ll see in the examples below). Collaging can also help you better understand the user’s needs, in turn helping you to address them in your product. You gain an emotional understanding of the user’s feelings, problems, state of mind and so on, which is imperative to know when designing for them. What You Can LearnĬollaging is a method of building empathy with your users. The collage becomes a catalyst for discussion, an ice-breaker. The research topic might be too personal, controversial or sensitive for the participant to just open up and start discussing with a complete stranger. Depending on what you’re researching, participants might have difficulty opening up to you. Sometimes you do, but you don’t know how to ask it. There are also times when you don’t know the right question to ask. Instead, by presenting a visual stimulus, we are letting the participant start the conversation and bring up topics that are meaningful to them. When we ask a participant a set of pre-defined questions, we are predetermining the scope of the interview. Gerald Zaltman, author of How Customers Think, states that “95% of our thoughts and feelings are unconscious.” There is just so much that we carry around in thought but never share until something triggers it. An image can be a powerful stimulus that evokes a strong response, triggers a memory and draws out feelings that exist below a person’s own level of awareness. So, you might be asking yourself, “Why should I have people make collages, rather than just ask them point-blank questions about their needs and feelings?” It’s a great question, and the answer is, sometimes the most valuable answer is not in response to a direct question, but one that’s elicited. Art Manifestos and Their Applications in Contemporary Design.Up On The Wall: How Working Walls Unlock Creative Insight.Get Creative With Collage: Trends and Inspiration.This information enables us to better understand the user’s world and how to design for it. The collage becomes an instrument through which participants are able to express needs and feelings that they might not otherwise have been able to articulate. The participants then explain to the moderator the reason they chose each image. This is where collaging can help.Ĭollaging is a projective technique by which participants select images that represent how they feel about a particular topic. Just imagine what you could discover if the participant’s answers weren’t limited to a predetermined set of questions. When conducting user research, we all know that asking the right questions is just as important as how you ask them, but how do you know exactly what questions to ask? What if the discussion topic is very personal? How do you get a complete stranger to open up? There is a better way to conduct an in-depth interview, and it doesn’t involve a clipboard.
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