Zooming in and out: framing in design research
The other day I found myself rapt, binge-watching a YouTube series from WIRED called “5 Levels”. The idea behind it is fairly simple: they take a topic and have an expert explain it at 5 levels, to 5 different people. The topics are usually somewhat technical and scientific, like blockchain, gravity, and lasers.
The first level of explaining is always to a child. The expert sits with the child, and patiently explains the topic to them.
“Blockchain is actually a way we can trade. Do you know what trade is?”
The expert then continues to explain the topic to a teenager; an undergrad student; a grad student getting a degree in the field; and finally a professional in the industry.
As you can imagine, as the listeners increase in age, the conversations increase in complexity. The vocabulary changes, more concepts are added in. What begins as a one-way teaching of information quickly morphs into a two-way exchanging of questions and answers; sharing of ideas; riffing and brainstorming; until finally, you hear a conversation amongst equals who share the same passion.
What I found fascinating was how the exact same subject could be presented, discussed, and examined so many different ways. It’s all about perspective.
This made me think of a different video on perspective: the Eames’ brothers Power of 10. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth stopping and having a watch.
In it, a couple is enjoying a picnic at the lake. Zoom out and we see their city, their state, the world, outer space, and more and more space. Zoom in and we see a man’s hand, his skin, cells, DNA, and electrons whizzing around.
In the world of design, this idea of zooming in and zooming out has another name: framing. One definition of framing is deciding which problem to solve. Re-framing problems often helps spark innovation, and help teams see opportunities they didn’t see previously.
As a researcher, I use framing as a tool to take the problems product teams are hyper-focused on, and ensure they’re not ignoring other levels of important user information. Because no matter how much time you spend re-designing your gorgeous homepage, no user/product interaction exists in a vacuum.
A good researcher can take a project and add a few extra levels of zoom. By both reframing — zooming out and zooming in — our research can uncover aspects of the user experience teams might not have thought about otherwise.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you work for a retail company with an online shopfront. The team has asked you to “do some research” on purchasing.
Now imagine a user — let’s call her Tammy — is interested in purchasing a shirt from your company. Tammy has just clicked through to look at a shirt’s Details page. She browses the available color options. She looks at the sizing details. She even reads a few reviews from previous purchasers. She checks the price. Finally, she decides to go for it, and clicks the “add to cart” button.
This is one level at which we could focus our research. We could examine the usability of this flow, from Tammy clicking “add to cart”, through to completing the transaction. We could also look at the usefulness of the content available throughout the flow.
But zooming out one level, we see Tammy was browsing the site for quite a while — 10 minutes — before she landed on that shirt page and chose to add it to her cart. There were lots of other interactions happening there. Perhaps Tammy was reading more about the history of our company or looking up shipping information. Perhaps she was browsing lots of other items before this single shirt.
We could focus our research at the site-wide level, to understand overall usefulness and usability. We could even incorporate analytics like looking at common pages, flows, time on page, etc.
Zooming out another level, we learn Tammy’s visited our site several times previously, on both her phone and laptop. We learn how she originally heard about our company and that she’s been following our Instagram account for months. Though she’s never purchased anything, she’s developed opinions about the site and our brand.
If we focus at this level, we could dig into things like what about this visit makes repeat visitors like Tammy pull the trigger? Was there something that made this purchase special (like a big event coming up)? Or something about our site that prompted the purchase (like a sale)? We could also dig into our company’s overall brand perception.
If we zoom out even further, we enter territory beyond our company’s site. We learn that Tammy regularly purchases clothing online, and often straight from Instagram. We learn where she shops regularly, (gasp! some of our competitors), why, and what she enjoys about these experiences.
We could focus our research at this level: on our customers and their interactions, perceptions, and experiences with online clothing brands. We could also look at online shopping in general, and its pain points. This could perhaps give us some ideas for how to innovate within the online shopping space as a whole.
Zooming out even further, we’re no longer purely focused specifically on clothing, or even online shopping. We learn more about Tammy, who she is, her technology habits, and values. Maybe Tammy considers herself quite tech-savvy, is glued to her iPhone and loves downloading apps. We learn she’s got a young son and tries to save money as much as she can, however shopping online is her one indulgence. We learn more about her values.
We could focus our research at this level, to understand our customers and their worlds, broadly. We could dig in to understand drivers behind their purchases and other influencing factors. This could help us create research artifacts like personas or archetypes.
We can keep going too.
If we zoom out one more level, we can look at people like Tammy and their backgrounds, their context, their histories. We can learn about where they grew up, how they were raised, and explore cultural expectations around purchasing behaviors at a broader level.
Zooming out even further, we could look at purchasing behaviors and trends within specific user segments, perhaps in certain age ranges, or income ranges, geographic locations, or countries. This would likely be data, graphs, and charts.
Zooming out to perhaps at the highest level, we could look at macro-trends for online purchasing behavior around the world, over the past 5, 10, 20, 50 years. This would definitely be data, graphs, and charts.
But, we can also do this the other way: zooming in. Remember Tammy sitting at her computer, having just added this shirt to her cart?
We can zoom in on a single screen, and the components within it. How is the information visually laid out? What is the information hierarchy? Is it too cluttered? What does the copy say, and is it clear to users? How do Tammy’s eyes track along the page and take it all in?
Zooming in further, we can break the screen down into things like typography, color, iconography, and things like gestures for mobile devices.
If we go even one step further, we see the pixels on the screen and the actual (what I would call) micro-alignment of the icons and text. (Research is rare at this level, but designers do think about it often!)
Zooming out and in also works well when you’re looking at a collaborative, team-based product. You can look at the behaviors at the individual user level, but also at the team level, the company level, the industry level, and on and on.
Just like with WIRED’s “5 levels” videos, with design research, you can explore the same topic many different ways.
Deciding on a frame (or zoom level) for your research will depend on many things, like where your team is in the design process, and how you believe your research can add the most value.
But I do encourage you to add 1 or 2 extra levels of zoom from the original research brief. Because as a researcher you often have a unique position and perspective. You’re not creating the screens and pushing pixels. You’re not thinking about roadmaps and shipping timelines. Your main focus is users and their worlds. So you can stand back, zoom out, and wonder… what are some things the product team may not be considering here?
One technique I like to do when I’m starting a new research project is to do a quick mind map on the research question at hand (in this example, shopping online). This helps me think of additional topics to discuss with participants.
Researchers also get to zoom in, and inspect the finer details of what users do and say. I find spending time re-watching sessions and reviewing transcripts to be most helpful here. Perhaps the majority of participants hovered over a button, unsure what it did, because the iconography was confusing. Or perhaps there was a single word that every participant used, when they spoke about your brand, and this speaks volumes about the way they perceive your company.
So at what level is your product team focusing right now? Where might you be able to zoom out, or zoom in, in your research?
