Salmon: A Research Synthesis Tool
user research + interactive Prototype for Design Thinkers + User Researchers at Honda R&D Americas
Client
HONDA R&D AMERICAS,
MHCI CAPSTONE
Duration
8 Months
My Role
PRODUCT MANAGER,
PROJECT MANAGER,
UX RESEARCH & DESIGN
Team
MATT FRANKLIN, HALEY PARK, CAITLIN COYUITO, MICHAEL SILVESTRE
Don’t let your insights get washed away
In a sea of technological and business requirements, Design Thinkers are challenged to keep human empathy at the center of the design process. Yet the tools of today are inefficient and divided, reducing users to one-dimensional data points.
Researchers constantly struggle to present their human-based findings in a way that is understandable and credible to experts and novices alike, especially in data-driven organizations.
Introducing Salmon
Salmon is a research synthesis tool designed to streamline and support user-centered innovation. Effortlessly annotate, synthesize, and deliver your research — all in one workflow.
Check out the 2-minute video below to get to know Salmon:
Just Want to see the full product, or how it was made?
salmon changes everything
The Current Stream to Insights
The current research journey involves manually collecting and transferring data across multiple platforms, which leads to massive amounts of lost time, energy, and even data. Worthwhile notes, observations, and user pain points often get stuck behind one of the “dams” within the stream.
By the time data is synthesized, it’s difficult to reliably trace back how insights were developed and identify which users or research materials they represent.
The future journey with salmon
Salmon recognizes that insights are based upon an intricate network between researchers and their users, and following those connections back to the source is vital to maintaining empathy and demonstrating credibility.
Allowing seamless, multi-directional travel on the stream of research allows researchers to continuously remain in-touch with their original human sources, view and present the foundation of their insights, and understand how individual pieces of evidence can contribute to even deeper conclusions.
WHO BENEFITS FROM SALMON
Salmon was designed to help user researchers and Design Thinkers by providing a flexible structure that guides both novices and experts through data analysis and synthesis.
User Researchers
Salmon gives veteran researchers the power to collect evidence from all sorts of research documents and transcripts, even directly embedding links to spreadsheets, images, and other documents.
The easy tagging and search functionality lets researchers focus on discovering higher-level connections and hidden opportunities.
Never scour a sea of post-it notes for a missing piece of evidence again!
DESIGN THINKING STUDENTS
Conducting research within complex problem spaces is hard for anyone, let alone budding researchers. Salmon keeps things simple, so students can focus on analyzing their evidence and creating solid insights.
Students can also give visibility into their research to their teammates and mentors through comments, quantitative progress results, and easily generated research reports.
DESIGN THINKING FACILITATORS
Educators often oversee multiple projects at a time, which makes immersing themselves within every problem space a challenge.
Salmon helps facilitators see students’ train of thought that led to their insights, even from afar.
Saving time on understanding students’ research means that they can more easily identify critical issues or missed opportunities within their research goals, participant pools, and more.
Salmon helps you travel between 3 key stages of user research:
1. Annotate
Extract evidence directly from your research documents and interview transcripts.
2. Synthesize
Cluster and analyze your evidence with other research from the same problem space.
3. Deliver
Keep your evidence at the center of your reports and presentations.
… And then, Keep it all Organized.
Find all of your research files, synthesis boards, and deliverables in Salmon’s all-in-one Dashboard.
Try it yourself!
In order to give users the chance to experience Salmon firsthand, two prototypes were created. Together they demonstrate the capabilities of the design, and invite feedback on potential improvement. While these prototypes only represent the user-facing portion of Salmon, they make the ideas represented in the design more tangible.
The Figma prototype is comprehensive, showing the full process of Annotation, Synthesis, and Delivery, but only represents a superficial view of Salmon’s capabilities and interactivity.
The React prototype focuses exclusively on the Synthesis process, and dives much deeper into the details and interactivity with functional filtering, clustering, and evidence modals. See for yourself!
Our Amazing Clients
Honda Research & Development Americas is responsible for researching, designing, and developing products for the Honda and Acura brands. Honda R&D wants to develop new tools and practices that help their mechanical engineers innovate and create a better, smarter, greener tomorrow for everyone.
99P Labs was founded by Honda R&D Americas in 2018 as a digital proving ground to test mobility and energy ideas. 99P works with Ohio State University and other local startups to develop a data-driven ecosystem of collaborative research tools for building customer empathy & business innovation within Honda.
The research behind salmon
The Challenge
Our team was asked by Honda R&D Americas (HRA) to create an intelligent platform for learning design thinking, to be used in Honda’s 99P Labs’ corporate idea accelerator by OnRamp students from OSU.
Due to the enthusiastic reception our research received across Honda, we broadened the scope to also include Honda’s own engineers as they learn Design Thinking from Honda Innovations Silicon Valley.
Understanding HONDA GLOBAL
Honda is no small company. In order to get a better understanding of the ecosystem we were working in, we created a comprehensive stakeholder map of the relationships and value flows within Global Honda.
The DISCOVERY Process
Who are we designing for?
My team challenged ourselves to design a product that brings value to both 99P Lab’s student externship program with Ohio State University (OnRamp), as well as Honda engineers in Design Thinking educational programs and Think Tanks.
We used a wide range of evaluative research methods to assess our users’ needs, create artifacts that help us empathize with and communicate their problems, and then narrow down to standout opportunities that would bring the most value to both our users and our clients.
Click for Full Personas + Journey Maps:
Their User Research Journey
The User Research Process (Highlighted: Salmon’s scope)
gaining understanding & empathy
Through literature analyses, semi-structured interviews, storyboards, and other evaluative research methods, we validated the original need for an intelligent Design Thinking education tool, and gained an incredibly deep understanding of Design Thinking education and information sharing.
pain points & Opportunities
Our evaluative research methods exposed the two most pervasive, frustrating, value-diminishing problems that our students and their mentors face.
Based on our competitive analyses, we also found that these primary pain points are not adequately addressed by their current tools or other tools on the market. The two highest-value opportunities for our design solution to serve are:
1. Credibility
Design Thinking students frequently struggle to demonstrate the credibility and rigor of their research to mentors, bosses, and other teams or departments.
This is especially difficult in data-driven organizations which trust quantitative metrics over qualitative insights. If user researchers cannot speak the same “language” as data scientists and engineers, it is nearly impossible to get cross-functional support and organizational buy-in.
Click for the Competitive Analysis of existing tools used to demonstrate credibility when presenting research.
2. Data Sustainability
Researchers frequently complain that they might be unknowingly re-doing work that has already been done. Neither professionals nor students believe that future researchers will know how to find their data, much less correctly understand and re-use it.
Making research searchable and usable by others is complex, time-consuming, and unreliable, but it is still vital for their own teammates, other teams during project hand-offs, and researchers around the world in similar fields.
Click for the Competitive Analysis of existing tools used to document and search for research.
The Design Process
We explored a variety of solutions...
Prototyping
Our team explored a wide range of opportunities between understanding data and establishing credibility by repeatedly designing, testing, and iterating. Our designs progressed from lowest to highest fidelity: conceptual sketches, low-fidelity prototypes, testable mid-fidelity prototypes, and interactive high-fidelity prototypes.
Each prototype was designed as possible solution to one of the following opportunity statements:
1. How might we evaluate or demonstrate the credibility of research?
“When going through interview transcripts, I need an easy way to associate quotes with specific insights to make my insights credible and understandable when I present them.”
- “Evidence Tracker” Prototype
2. How might we document or tag research to be searchable and usable by others?
“In my project, I need to easily find out what my team is working on, what still needs to be completed, and to find and understand our project files.”
- “Research Pocket” Prototype
...And narrowed down our focus
The highest-level purpose of Salmon was honed over many rounds of increasingly more targets user studies, competitive analyses, and client feedback.
Both professional and academic users repeatedly testified that demonstrating and evaluating the credibility of research was their most immediate and important unmet need, showing the highest level of demand for the credibility-focused Evidence Tracker prototype.
While data sustainability and searchability are still wanted, even the most-desired documentation and tagging features from the opposing Research Pocket prototype were primarily valued for their ability to track evidence and justify researchers’ insights in the name of research credibility.
Feature Prioritization
I developed a MoSCoW Prioritization matrix to determine which features we “Must”, “Should”, “Could”, or “Won’t” include in our final design.
Based on the feedback from our users, clients, and market research, our team assessed which capabilities and features were most integral to demonstrating credibility.
From this exercise, we reaching a common understanding on the importance placed on the delivery of each requirement.
Expanding upon success
With further design iterations and testing, the Evidence Tracker prototype evolved into a more comprehensive tool for tracking and evaluating credibility throughout the research process.
We developed high-fidelity interactive Figma prototypes of four research stages along our User Journey Map: Research, Annotate, Synthesize, and Deliver.
Value proposition: credible insights
The most exciting and unique part of Salmon is its Synthesis Boards, where Design Thinkers can use intelligent data analyses and affinity diagrams to distill complex data into insights that are backed up by both qualitative and quantitative evidence.
No other tool on the market offers such a seamless and powerful connection to source data during synthesis. Thus, our team committed to developing Salmon’s Synthesize stage to the highest fidelity.
Testing a functional React Prototype
There is incredible value in watching users interact with a functional product. To truly demonstrate Salmon’s value proposition, we needed to test how users would actually search, create, and connect information on their own in a functional Synthesis Board, built using the React JavaScript library.
Although a significant amount of work, this is the most effective way to assess the power of Salmon’s synthesis capabilities within a remote environment.
From this work, Salmon was born
Through eight months of research and prototyping, we are excited to share our end product.
Like salmons instinctively knowing their way back to their birthplace upstream, Salmon provides an intuitive experience to go back to the source of data, no matter what phase you’re at in your research.
Information Architecture (UML)
The Dashboard provides a common entryway and access to the other three interfaces.
First, Files are brought into a project for Annotation and converted into individual pieces of Evidence. Each piece of Evidence is a quote, a note, or a summary of a file, and links back to its source.
Then in the Synthesis Board, Evidence is grouped into Clusters, which can themselves be grouped into higher level Clusters. Thanks to the metadata behind each piece of evidence, Statistics can be tabulated for clusters to help users generate Insights.
These Statistics and Insights can easily be used for Delivery with assets that link all the way back to the source Files.
What do people say about Salmon?
Design Thinking Students
“It makes the unpleasant parts about honing, documenting, and organizing aggregated data a lot easier.”
- Design Thinking Student
“I would use it all the time, I'm telling you. This is so useful… [for] Honda, I've worked for that company so many times. They love being able to reference quotes from customers, because otherwise it's not valid. So this will be very useful.
- Design Thinking Student
“This is everything I wish we had… Oh my god, this is definitely so helpful. I don't think any of the teams I've worked with even have written it out like this. We just write out timestamps and quotes, and that's about it.”
- Design Thinking Student
Design Thinking Educators
“I appreciate how comprehensive this is. Especially when they're creating insights or their presentations, being able to justify the data points in this deeper level will add to their credibility.”
- Design Thinking Facilitator
It's very familiar, which is great; there's no added friction. But the benefit of this is we don't have to be as rigid with our analysis structure, if we can simply click on a tag.... That's a really, really powerful different way to look at this.”
- Design Thinking Facilitator
“Definitely the clustering part, you guys hit it with that being your main value prop and also the most laborious part of our current workflow…. It's saved a lot of tool conversions.”
- Design Thinking Facilitator
User Researchers
“The unique differentiator here is the opportunity to pull [insights] directly into something that's presentation-ready. And I like the fact that [you can] zoom in and out of whatever you're referencing in real-time... That's something I haven't seen before.”
- User Researcher
"For me, it would be great to be able to draw clear lines of evidence from the responses and make sure I'm not making an extrapolations or expansions on what was said when I reiterated or summarized."
- User Researcher
“I really wish I had had this already.”
- User Researcher
"Can you guys have this made before I start working on our final report?"
- User Researcher
