Submit your reading response by making a comment on this post. In your response, please respond to each of the prompts below. Please number your responses so it’s clear which response goes with which prompt.

Battarbe, Suri, & Howard

1) In discussing some of the obstacles to having empathy, the authors say the following:

However, some of the qualities and behaviors that can make a person successful in business can stand in the way of achieving empathy: people who cannot temporarily let go of their role or status or set aside their own expertise or opinion will fail to empathize with others who have conflicting thoughts, experiences, or mental models. (p. 62)

It is interesting to ask if the same thing can be said about the qualities and behaviors that make someone successful in academia.

• Do you think this quote is also applicable to the typical professor at Western? Why or why not? Feel free to draw on your own experience to explain your reasoning.

2) Near the end of the article, the authors discuss some examples of ways they’ve helped companies understand the experience of their customers. A couple notable examples are under the headings “Long-Term Immersion” and “Take Clients on ‘Visceral Journeys’ “. Obviously these kinds of activities represent a significant investment of time and energy by the company involved.

• What obstacles can you envision that might prevent these kinds of practices becoming routine and wide-spread?
• What factors do you think might encourage or promote the use of such practices? (in other words, what could you do to make them more likely)

Koupre and Visser

3) In the first part of their article, the authors essentially say that lots of people are talking about empathy, but that designers have been vague about what this means, and so they want to draw on the psychology literature to put the concept of empathy on a more solid foundation. Academic and professional disciplines can be thought of as mini-cultures, so in many ways this is similar to people from one culture trying to borrow or adapt ideas from another culture. And people can have strong feelings about this kind of borrowing, as the recent furor about a Utah teen wearing a traditional Chinese-style dress to prom illustrates (if you aren’t familiar with the story, here’s a news article about it).

• Speaking as a psychologist, what is one thing you liked about how the authors borrowed ideas from psychology?
• What is one thing you didn’t like?

4) A related issue that comes up in the article is the difference between describing a concept in a way that is accurate versus in a way that is useful. Take how the article talks about the difference between ‘becoming’ and ‘staying beside.’ At one level, we could ask which way of describing empathy best captures the experience of real people in the world. At another level, we could ask which way of describing empathy is most useful to designers in their work. And there’s no guarantee that we would get the same answer in both cases. This issue comes up a lot in self-help books, for example, where authors will take the actual science, but then simplify things and gloss over the nuances in order to give people something that they can easily understand and apply in their own lives.

• In your own view, do you think it is a good idea to take findings from psychology and present them to a broad audience in a way that isn’t quite scientifically accurate but which is much easier for people to understand and apply? Why or why not?

Submit your reading response by making a comment on this post. In your response, please respond to each of the prompts below. Please number your responses so it’s clear which response goes with which prompt.

Esser

1) The author identifies four steps to developing empathy for your users. The last step is from a design perspective, but the first three (discovery, immersion, connection) are more like psychology research. Which of these three steps seems most important to you, and why?

Hulme

2) One of the things the talk does is contrast two views on giving the customer what they want. One of them is expressed on a button that is shown part way through the talk. The other is reflected in these two quotes, from two different parts of the talk:

“Because if you don’t, the customer will anyway.”

“Because if you don’t offer them in low friction, someone else will, often the customer.”

What are your own thoughts about these contrasting visions? Feel free to draw on your personal experience both as a customer and also, if you have had that experience, in a customer service role.

Visser et al

3) In Figure 6, the authors illustrate how their four ways of presenting information vary on two dimensions, openness and interactivity. In Figure 7, the authors show the number of ideas generated by designers when they were presented with data about users using each of these methods.

• Based on their (admittedly small) data set, which dimension seems to matter more in terms of how many ideas are generated?
• The authors don’t really explain this pattern; why do you think it occurs?

4) The authors note that the most common way that research about user experience is presented to designers is in the form of a written report. Yet in Study 2 a written report was associated with the lowest level of idea generation of the four methods tried.

• Why do you think we sometimes give people information in the form that is least useful for them? You can draw on your personal experience with other types of communication if you like.
• What lessons do you think we can take away from this finding about effective ways to communicate research findings?

Submit your reading response by making a comment on this post. In your response, please respond to each of the prompts below. Please number your responses so it’s clear which response goes with which prompt.

Bednall, Adam, & Plocinski

1) In the section of social persuasion techniques, the techniques that the authors discuss include reciprocation, consistency, and commitment. Out of these three techniques, which do you feel is the most unethical? Which do you feel is the most acceptable? Explain your answers.

2) Near the bottom of page 162, there is a brief mention of the use of incentives for completing surveys/interviews. The authors return to this issue on page 166 where they discuss the use of paid panels. Can you think of one reason why paying participants could be ethically problematic? Can you think of one reason why it would be preferable from an ethical point of view? In both cases assume reasonable incentives, e.g., an hourly rate similar to what the person would make in their job.

Nunan and Di Domenico

3) One of the main issues the authors discuss is the fact that organizations are often collecting and storing all sorts of data not because they have a specific purpose or research question in mind, but in the hope that they will find something useful in those data at some point. The authors bring up this issue several times, as reflected in the following quotes:

• “This creates an unintended use paradox. How can consumers trust an organisation with information when the organisation does not yet know how the information might be used in the future?” (p. 5)
• “Currently the ability of organisations to collect and store data runs far ahead of their ability to make use of it (Jacobs 2009). As a function of storing any, and all, unstructured data regardless of potential use cases this means that combinations of data for which there are currently no capabilities to analyse could become subject to privacy breaches in the future.” (p. 5)
• “However, given that big data often disintermediates the collection from analysis of data, the challenge is raised over what consent is being sought, given that the purpose of data collection may not be known.” (p. 8)
• “Furthermore big data is built upon the use of unstructured data, which, by definition, are collected without necessarily having knowledge of the purpose to which it will be put in the future.” (p. 9)

Do you think it is ethically permissible to ask people to provide consent to collect such data when we have no idea how the data might be used, and whether such uses would benefit or harm the individual providing consent? Explain your answer.

4) Another major theme in the paper is reflected in the four quotes below.

• “For market research to prosper it requires the continuing cooperation of respondents (Bednall
  et al. 2010), both in terms of providing data for research studies and in giving permission for these data to be analysed. In an environment where there are issues around increasing non-cooperation by respondents (Jarvis 2002; Curtin et al. 2005), it is essential for market researchers to be at the forefront of  understanding emergent ethical and privacy issues. This is even more critical where regulatory change poses a potential threat to market researchers’ ability to collect data in the future.” (pp. 2-3)
• “However, for market research, the importance of access is instrumental to the ability to deliver the product. The history of marketing activity provides us with many examples of situations where regulators have responded reactively to public perceptions of over-zealous, or unethical, marketing activity. From the promotion of ineffective ‘patent’ medicines in the 19th century through to tobacco and alcohol in the 20th century, in sectors that generate negative externalities regulatory pressure is never far behind. Given the criticality of online data collection to market research, and the potential for personal data to become a similarly hot topic of the 21st century, for the successful realisation of the potential of big data in market research it is also necessary to be proactive in responding to potential privacy issues, even if these have
  yet to reach the public imagination.” (p. 5)
• “Above all, for the commercial promise of big data to be delivered, it relies on trust. Without this trust in place, organisations face a pushback from both consumers and regulators.” (p. 10)
• “A failure to appreciate this changing relationship risks a political and regulatory environment that limits opportunities for almost any kind of online data collection and analysis, with knock-on effects for market researchers.” (p. 10)

Describe in your own words what point the authors are trying to make.

Submit your reading response by making a comment on this post. In your response, please respond to each of the prompts below. Please number your responses so it’s clear which response goes with which prompt.

Cole

1)  Cole presents several lists of attitudes and misconceptions in categories such as “general misconceptions about research,” “reasons why we should not conduct research,” “suggestions about how to design or conduct research,” etc. Pick three statements from three different lists. For each statement, first indicate which list it came from, and then quote the statement itself. Then, imagine you are a market researcher. Write 1-2 sentences explaining what’s problematic about it.

Enderle

2) Here are several quotes from Enderle’s blog post regarding the use of research and analytics:

“many who pay for the deployment of these tools will likely instead find they are used to showcase what idiots they were after the fact.”

“analytics is only going to make a bad decision look worse”

“it has the high probability of making executives look like idiots”

“First, avoid analytics as a decision tool. It’ll make executives look bad, and they probably won’t appreciate that.”

Is Enderle saying that analytics are a bad thing? If you think yes, then explain why he thinks they are bad. If you think no, explain what you think he actually means by these quotes. (2-3 sentences)

Highhouse

3) Highhouse argues that the failure to use analytical procedures in the hiring process is driven by two implicit beliefs. He then has two sections of the article that specifically discuss each belief, labeled “Irreducable Unpredictability” and “Myth of Expertise.” For each belief, first write a sentence briefly explaining what the belief is. Then write 1-2 sentences explaining how it undermines the use of analytical procedures in hiring.