One of the most important parts of my job is helping my clients to see the world from the perspective of their customers.
This gives my clients a better understanding of how their customers see the world, what problems they have and how they live their lives.
This understanding helps them to make better product and service decisions that should ultimately result in better outcomes for their customers.
One of the most effective methods we have to help communicate stories about people is photography.
Think how impactful and deliberate the photography that is chosen to accompany news stories and how that influences your understanding, compassion and interest for the people in those stories.
Over the years I’ve played around with using photography in different ways to help clients gain a better understanding of their customers.
One of my favourite examples was inspired by Nick Hand’s excellent Photofilms.
Nick has made hundreds of short (typically 4 minute) photofilms consisting of a series of photos accompanied by the voice of the subject.
They are incredibly powerful, easy to consume and really help you to understand someone in a very short period of time.
We used this method to tell the story of victims of flooding in the UK years ago and it remains one of my favourite projects.
We asked victims of flooding to share their own personal photos of the flood damage in their houses we recorded the stories they told us about the experience.
We combined the photos with their stories and created photofilms creating one of the most impactful user research artifacts I can remember.
They were a real joy to put together and relatively easy to do in proportion to the impact they had.
I’ve been mulling over easier ways of doing these and love the idea of people using their phones to edit and create their own stories (to remove the researcher bias when editing peoples stories – ideas welcome!).
Here’s a great article by Richard Arnott where he interviews Nick Hand and discusses using Soundslides in the context of user research.
Another great example is shown within this film of a digital anthropology student who is sharing a photographic record of her research with the Mohawk nation who live on the border between USA and Canada. I think books of photographs like hers could be such powerful research artefacts for service design work.
James Chudley 