Research - Nonprofit in the Arts and Sciences

Product Development, Research Plan, Interviews, Card Sort, Personas, Competitive Analysis, Presentation

the case study

I created the concept for a nonprofit named MAIAG which is based my partner’s idea for a start up that would bring scientists and artists together to solve creative blocks in scientific research and creative production.

parameters and methodolgy

9 weeks - Adobe Acrobat, Airtable, Canva, Miro, MS Word, Zoom - Surveys, Interviews, Personas, Card Sort

research plan

Background

MAIAG is a company that wants to create a product and build a tool to pair scientists with artists to creatively approach scientific work and help scientists reconceive of their work and break through blocks or problems that they find in their research. Scientists excel at analytical, concrete and creative thinking which they bring to bear on their research. MAIAG asks how would they solve their research problems if they could get outside of them and think abstractly? Our client, Helen, has asked us to develop a tool that will help her business bring scientists and artists together to facilitate scientific breakthroughs and innovations. This research will uncover the kinds of pain points or blocks faced by scientific researchers and the interests and motivations of artists outside of their scientific discipline. It will develop user journeys for both the scientist and the artist as well as develop a product roadmap for bringing these two users together in a meaningful and productive way. This would also be a way to direct more funding into the arts.

To begin, I needed a roadmap to flesh out the business model for this new company and establish my role as UX lead for MAIAG.

The background section of our research plan provides context to our project. In this section I describe who my client is and the job that they’ve hired me to do.

Client

Helen, Non-Profit Director

Purpose + Business objectives

MAIAG wants to give scientists more options for understanding their work and solving problems in their research. MAIAG wants to better understand how scientists understand and communicate their blocks. They want to understand how artists/more abstract thinkers respond and communicate their understanding of those blocks. This business wants to identify communication styles that will foster creativity and understanding for both the artist and the scientist. The problems the company would like to assist in solving are blocks in scientific research. KPI’s might include problems solved, innovations, breakthroughs, funding directed to an artist.

The Client and Business Objectives sections bring the MAIAG organization to life. Here I explore MAIAG’s core values and goals which will help generate research that will not only lead to a product or tool to connect scientists with artists, but will further the overall mission of the organization.

Research objectives:

Understanding scientists and artists thoughts, needs, and perceptions
Exploring communication styles and how to determine compatibility between artist and scientist
Improve the scientific researchers understanding of their own work
Evaluating the performance of a product

Methodology

We will use generative research methods. We will use surveys and 1x1 interviews. The sessions will be brief. A sampling of 3 scientists and 3 artists. The sessions will be remote.

Participants

Scientists need to be actively working in their field. Artists need to be active in publishing, performing, or showing their work. Participants need to be a diverse demographic.

Anticipated timeline: 3-5 weeks.

Mapping out the actual research I was going to do was vital to the success of this project. Having only just created the nonprofit and design challenge, we really had no data to work with which gave me the opportunity to really start generating data sets. I defined our objectives and approaches. I decided to begin by working with scientists. We established a 3-5 week timeline to conduct the research which in turn would give us 3 weeks to analyze and interpret our data.

logo

competitive analysis

We began our research to find a product to bring artists and scientists together by doing a competitive analysis. I found many organizations that combine science with the arts in some capacity but did not find one who’s explicit mission was to join artists and scientists to help each other toward breakthroughs.

The top four results in our competitive analysis were

NYFA, ASAP, ArtSci Nexus and IDEO.

Competitive Research [MAIAG]

the interview

The interview questions

What kind of research do you do?
How does collaboration come into play with this work?
What is your experience with art?
What do you do to relax or have fun?

Conducting the interviews was a lot of fun and informative. I formulated open ended questions to get the conversations going and that would allow the person being interviewed to really share their thoughts, experiences, insights and feelings freely. This allowed for expansive conversations that went in many unexpected directions.

card sort

how might we statements

Dr. Kravats is a highly engaged chair of a Biology department at her university who is short on time and is looking for ways to engage her mostly liberal arts focused students in her science classes.

HMW statements

How might we connect Dr. Kravats to artists who will engage her students?
How might we help Dr. Kravats redesign her science curriculum so it will appeal to the art students?
How might we connect Dr. Kravats with funding for projects that connect science and the arts?

Problem statements

Dr. Kravats needs to integrate art into her science curriculum because it will engage her students more.
Dr. Kravats needs to be able to identify art that will appeal to her students quickly so that her students will not lose interest.
Dr. Kravats needs to engage students in order to retain funding.
Dr. Kravats needs to partner with artists who are interested and/or respect pedagogy.
Dr. Kravats needs to integrate art and science in order to have unexpected insights into her research.

Still early in the first iteration of our research process, I wanted to explore more options and directions to take our product. I wanted to reframe our design challenge to meet scientists where they were in their research and work.

personas

Building out the personas was the most fun and allowed us to really get creative and bring our research to life.

Here we have our foundational persona, that of the Scientist.

presenting my research

I decided that the best way to share our discoveries with the client was in conversation. I wanted to create a casual and professional atmosphere where we could explore the research in meaningful ways.

I made a board to brainstorm some ideas for the interview and begin to capture the look and the feel of how I wanted our client to experience our research results and recommendations.

Prep_for_Final Project Research Presentation- UX Design 1.png

sharing results with the client

I recorded the research presentation and interview to refer back to as I prepared to conduct more research.

empathize, define, ideate, prototype, evaluate, and repeat

At the conclusion of our research it was clear that we needed more data before going onto the ideation and prototyping phase of our case study.

The interviews were fun and informative but they were also very time consuming to set up, conduct, and analyze. Our next steps will be to conduct more research with a focus on user surveys to get more data more quickly. From there we’ll build out one or two more personas and begin to ideate and prototype solutions.

This project began when I was first introducing design thinking into my process as an academic librarian. As a result of bringing academic librarianship and design thinking together, my work became more rewarding and creatively engaging. I was getting better results across all my projects, and having a lot more fun with them too.

And with this evolution, my relationship to research began to shift. My perspective evolved from being a navigator and guide to include that of the creator and maker.

I began to conduct research projects of my own and build out products in response to that research. Along the way I discovered how experience and interaction design were not only informing the overall feel of the journey but had a direct impact on the deliverables and outcome. Experience design, in all of its facets, had transformed my ability to understand and interpret the results I was getting, and the products I was building.

With these modes of transformation in mind, I developed this case study in order to conduct user research and develop a new product that would help creative people, especially artists and scientists connect and create networks for creative breakthroughs.