RESEARCH
TED Talk Reflection
10:28 PM
In this Ted Talk, Shawn Achor mainly talked about how
to become positive through reversing people’s formula for happiness and success
– be happy first, then you will success naturally. He also mentioned that
scientific analysis based on average level comparison. Both of these two points
inspired me a lot.
Image from flickr
The first idea he brought in is average level. When I
heard it, it reminds me of so-called the public and the minority. When I doing
design research, I’m always reminded focusing on the public feedback. Most of
time, the voices of the minority are deleted or ignored as incredible and invaluable
information. But sometimes I wonder how we define “the public” and “the
minority”. After all, as an individual, people always hold on different
opinions. Most of them may see one thing in same way. But can we say they are “the
public” because of that? Or we divided people or customers into different
groups according to their background, ages, gender or etc. The people in the
same group suppose to come out the similar results. However in fact, there
always some of the group members don’t see things in a particular way which
makes them become “the minority”.
However the interesting thing is I find that sometimes the
opinions of “the minority” is more funny and thoughtful than “the public”. So
maybe we should dig more about “the minority” in future research work. Even
their data is not that useful on probability and statistics, it may contribute a
bunch of new ideas through asking several “why” and “how”.
Another view of Achor’s talk I like is his reversing
theory. Sometimes, we just get things backwards. In my Free Space project, our
team grappled with their attitude of taking donation and the shorting of money
reality. We thought that their attitude that refusing any profit-purposed donation
is the main reason now they are lack of money. I wonder is there any place
where we can stand into and reverse the question.
1 评论
Hi Rui. I am a little confused by your assertion about "the public" versus the minority. In design research it is important to look at the extreme cases, or, as you are calling them, the minorities. You definitely should not discard information from your extreme users. As you say, oftentimes the feedback of the "minority" users are more funny and thoughtful than the "public." This is why with design research extreme users can often give you insights that lead to a better design for all users. Come find me if you have questions!
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