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Every good design begins with good research.

Whether you're a designer, a product manager, or

an engineer, the first step in creating a product is to understand the user and

define the problem you're trying to solve.

A good and successful product solves a problem for people.

Once you've done the research around your users and

defined the problem, then you can explore all the possible solutions to the problem.

The first stage of designing a product is called discovery.

Understanding the user is one of the first and

most important things you'll need to do as a designer.

You may have heard the term empathic research,

which is all about understanding and empathizing with users.

As designers, we need to better understand who it is that we're designing for

by observing people, how they behave, and how they think or feel, so

that we can help solve a problem or a need.

There is a wide range of research methods out there,

especially at the early stages of a product.

There are research methods such as field studies, focus groups, interviewing, or

surveys that will help you better understand the opportunity or

the problem you're trying to solve by talking to users.

Creating personas is also a great way to build empathy.

Personas help you and your team to keep your users in mind with every decision.

Whether you're a designer, a product manager, or a developer,

it's important that every person on the team is thinking about the user, and

that everyone works together to keep the user

at the forefront at every stage of the product development process.

For our project, I want you to go and

talk to at least ten people who have used Craigslist at least once recently.

You can choose to interview them in person, or

you can also send out a quick survey email to your friends, family, or colleagues.

During this exercise, ask them about their experience with using the product and

gather any insights.

Here's a list of questions to help you get started.

When was the last time you used Craigslist?

What was it for?

What types of things do you do on Craigslist?

And what do you like most about Craigslist?

What do you like least about Craigslist?

Tell me about the last time you tried to sell something on Craigslist.

And tell me about the last time you bought something on Craigslist.

How often do you use Craigslist?

What would make you want to use Craigslist more?

For more tips on how to conduct interviews or

create interview scripts, refer to the teacher's notes.

After you've done your research,

you may be wondering what to do with all that data.

First, take all the data from your interviews or survey and

organize them into one place like a spreadsheet.

You can use the sample spreadsheet provided in the project files as

a template, or you can create your own.

Notice that the interview questions are color coded because this will help

you later on when we begin to organize and analyze the data.

Once you've finished adding all the data, begin making some initial observations.

What do users like about using Craigslist?

What are some common pain points that users are experiencing?

For example, if the majority of your users are saying that they're worried about

safety and whether they can trust Craigslist or

not, that's an opportunity or a problem to solve.

As you start to look through your data, you can make notes for

yourself by highlighting or bolding the data that seems important.

Now it´s time to analyze your data.

Tracking all the data and finding patterns can be difficult,

especially when you've got a long spreadsheet full of text.

Affinity mapping, or affinity diagram, is a tool that gathers large amounts of data

and organizes them into groups based on their natural relationships.

It provides a complete picture of the research, showing trends, themes, issues,

and areas of opportunity for improvement.

Using sticky notes is a great way to create an affinity map.

This could be done with real sticky notes, or

you can do this digitally by using a free product called RealtimeBoard.

Let's go ahead and open a new browser window, and go to realtimeboard.com.

RealtimeBoard is an online whiteboard that's useful for

visual team collaboration.

You can add sticky notes, images, mockups, drawings,

videos, etc., onto an endless canvas and share it with your teammates.

It saves a lot of time and makes collaboration much easier,

especially if your teammates are working in remote locations.

The link to the RealtimeBoard website is also in the teacher's notes.

After you sign up, log in to get started.

If you're using a Mac computer, you can activate the split screen mode

by clicking and holding down the full screen icon of your browser.

You can drop the RealtimeBoard browser into one side of your screen, and

then drop the Google spreadsheet into the other side.

You can also resize your split screen window to what works best for you.

A split screen will help save you a lot of time from switching back and

forth to different browsers or programs as you work.

Create a new board in RealtimeBoard and click on the frame tool,

and choose a custom frame to begin.

Click on the paint bucket icon to add a color to the background of your frame.

Then click on the sticky note tool and choose Bulk mode.

I'm going to assign the color green for

all of these notes as it corresponds to the color in the spreadsheet.

Let's start by entering the data for

the question, what do you like most about Craigslist?

Once you're done entering your insights for this portion, click Done.

You can resize the sticky notes so that they can fit into your frame.

Then continue adding the rest of your data using different color sticky notes that

match with the color you've assigned in your spreadsheet.

Once you've gathered your research,

select the frame and choose the More icon,

then Duplicate to create a copy of this frame.

On this new frame, begin to organize and

group the sticky notes based on similar insights or topics

Start making observations like, which topics or

insights were repeated the most, and jot down any notes.

This will help you create insight statements.

Here is an example of what your board might look like after you finish grouping.

Now create a new frame, and then click on the sticky note icon and

choose a color that you haven't used yet.

Look at your insights and notes you've taken and

write insight statements that summarize the main points.

For example, the summary of these two columns is that

scammers cause users to feel nervous and worried.

You can write an insight statement like, users are worried, nervous, and

furious because of scammers and scam posts.

Here are the insight statements I came up with from my research.