LESSON LEARNED: GO HUNT DISCREPANCIES BY DIGGING DEEPER!

It’s me and a young preschool teacher, both curious and a bit uncertain about what’s about to happen, awkwardly sitting face-to-face in a little office full of children’s books. As an icebreaker, I start by throwing a simple question from the interview script. It’s supposed to reveal something about their relationship with one of the major stakeholders: parents.

Q: “How do you feel about the relationship between preschool teachers and the parents?”
A: “We have built a healthy and productive relationship with the parents and we really appreciate and value their inputs.”

“This answer is as boring as it can get!” I scream silently. I also notice that it is not far from what I would’ve guessed them to say. But my guts intuitively smell that there has to be more to it. So I choose to twist and tweak the question a little, to dig deeper and make this visit worth the time and effort by identifying a potential discrepancy.

Q: “How do you communicate with them?”
A: “We send monthly newsletters called the Yellow Paper and parents sometimes send us emails with questions and inputs.”

Something hits me. I notice a discrepancy. How could the teachers build a “healthy” and “productive” relationship when their communication methods are apparently not face-to-face, not real-time, and filtered? I have learned from my Olin experiences that not talking usually means not communicating. They should talk instead of spending time on writing these newsletters! I feel the need to DIG DEEPER.

Q: “When do you get to talk to the parents? Could you walk me through the very last interaction you had with a parent?”
A: “Yes, this morning, I talked to a mom dropping her kids off here. She told me the kids didn’t have a chance to eat breakfast and handed over some snacks so that I can feed them.”
Q: “How long did the conversation last?”
A: “Roughly about a minute? You know, parents are busy these days and don’t want to be late for work.”

ding ding ding! This is a cowbell moment. Feeling confident that this piece of observation will help the team develop a more sophisticated insight later during the squeeze phase, I scribble down my thoughts.
“Preschool teachers rarely get the physical time to interact and communicate with parents”.

From the story I just told, I learned that designers gain meaningful insights often by asking a series of questions that dig deeper into a specific area of interest. In my story, the area of interest was the teacher-parent relationship. To do the digging effectively, I went hunting for discrepancies in the interviewee’s words, actions, and the surrounding environment. Designers should care about these discrepancies because they contain the hidden and implicit information that effectively aids the designers to observe the subtle yet meaningful treasures that do not directly arise from the superficial conversations. These discrepancies are so well hidden that they won’t be noticed unless we proactively go hunt for them.

This lesson of go hunting for discrepancies can be particularly useful and applicable to contexts in which two stakeholders are aware that they are partners who aim to achieve the same goal (in my case: early childhood education) yet an implicit hierarchy (parents pay these teachers to do the job well) softly pushes one to talk more in a textbook-like manner about the other. Such tendency to talk safely and cautiously may lead to higher chances of discrepancies between their words and the reality, filters that might hinder designers from getting to the fruitful insights. An example would be a child asking the parents how they think of each other. The parents might tell something slightly negative about each other to the child, but definitely won’t tell everything single terrible things and will definitely be more conscious of their words.

We should nonetheless keep in mind that this strategy has its limits and does not apply to all designers who work with different stakeholder under various contexts and circumstances. Stakeholders who rather communicate with each other clearly and in a more straight-forward manner will presumably not present as many notable discrepancies that are worth hunting down.