The first workshop of this year started today! Led by Gabriella Piccolo and Elena Novati, the module will focus on the user research design phase and will face the topic of co-working. The workshop is in partnership with Spaces, an IWG Group (international Workplace Group) brand, represented by Margherita Sainaghi and Chiara Ricci who presented today the company brief. Co-working spaces are reshaping the environment of our working life, getting more and more consensus and meeting customers' needs. Nevertheless the pandemic and the following status of uncertainty has changed lots of our behaviors, influencing the way we make decisions, such as choosing the workplace environment.
The workshop will investigate how the research strategy plays an important role in the early stages of the design process, helping to have an in-depth understanding of the business, useful to orientate the concept stage in the right direction. Our students will apply a series of methodologies online and offline, discovering the principles of ethnography and netnography. They will use specific tools (such as observation grid, study guide, persona/archetype modeling, social media) to develop a meaningful analysis and find pros&cons among the insights they will collect. They will be also requested to analyze and interpret the data they will collect during the fieldwork and they will have to make sense of them to define potential pain points as well as future opportunities to develop.
Students will be guided through the definition of the qualitative research plan, from the early steps to the insight outcome. They will conduct a field research on site, experiencing first hand the ethnographic observation in a co-working space where they will interview the local contact person identified by the client and prospect clients found by the students. The students will learn how to build a meaningful study guide for the interview and they will also draft a structure of the observation grid to note down aspects and findings to translate them into insights. The findings collected during the fieldwork will be translated into insights after a qualitative analysis. Students will be guided again to build a persona profile/archetype and they will cluster their findings into relevant thematic families of insights. At the end of the research, each group will have to build a short insight report to present to the client during the last day. Good luck to all!
