Triadic elicitation (often called triading) is an interviewing technique that helps to identify deep-seated perceptions, attitudes and feelings towards brands, products, services (and people). The approach uncovers the ‘constructs’ that people use to make sense of the world around them, and comes from George Kelly’s Repertory Grid technique, founded in Personal Construct Theory. The Repertory Grid was developed specifically to elicit participant’s personal constructs with minimal bias and influence from a researcher. Read more »

Scarcity is the idea that things become more desirable when we perceive them to be more difficult to obtain if they are in short supply or available intermittently. Scarcity is a reliable way to move people to action, as when ideas or opportunities become scarcer, then they also become more desirable, and even those people who are less interested may be motivated to take greater notice. Scarcity can act as an indicator of quality which works in conjunction with the human interest in keeping options open and also the drive to avoid loss (loss aversion). This principle acts across a wide range of behaviours from sexual selection to negotiation strategies. Read more »

Inattentional blindness is the failure to mentally process a stimulus that is in clear view, leaving the observer without any awareness of the stimulus. It is a psychological lack of attention that typically happens when other tasks demanding attention are being performed. Read more »

AEIOU is a frequently used framework for guiding and structuring observational research. The framework creates a taxonomy of observations under the themes of Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users and is commonly used for coding observational data. Read more »

Observation is a fundamental skill for designers and researchers, requiring focus on hearing and seeing human behaviour, environments, events, artifacts and social interactions. Observational methods are often described in terms of their degree of formality and the level of structure designed into the observations and recording methods, as well as their intended use. Read more »

Cognitive dissonance is a feeling of discomfort on holding conflicting ideas, values, opinions, beliefs or emotions at the same time. This leads to a tendency to seek consistency by changing the importance or quality of one or more of the ideas, values, opinions, beliefs or emotions.The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ was first coined by Leon Festinger in 1956, inspired by his work studying a UFO cult, and which he later developed into a full theory in his book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. This is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and one of the most extensively researched. Read more »

Researchers can unobtrusively collect information using fly-on-the-wall observation, where there is no direct participation or interference with the people or behaviours that are being observed. This is a different approach to other types of observation (eg participant observation), intentionally avoiding direct involvement and therefore minimising the biases and influences that such involvement brings. However, the inability to connect with those observed or to probe behaviours and motivations can limit this approach.This makes such observation relatively less structured and more flexible than other approaches, although often guided by frameworks such as AEIOU which will be described in another article). Read more »

Laddering is a technique for revealing the connections between physical characteristics and deeper personal values. In a previous article, I wrote about cognitive mapping, which builds on Means-End Theory and Expectancy Value Theory and is also close to Personal Construct Theory developed by George Kelly (all originating in the 1950s). Read more »

Kano Analysis is used to determine which features of a product have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction, because not all features are equally important. The approach follows the philosophy that “more is better” is not always the best approach to maximising satisfaction, and that it can be more effective to prioritise those features which are most important to customers (or certain groups of customers). Read more »

Interference effects are the name given to the slowing of mental processing (with diminished accuracy) when there are competing mental processes. They occur when two or more perceptual or cognitive processes are in conflict, reflecting the multiple systems used by the brain to process information independently of one another. The outputs of these systems are communicated to working memory for interpretation when there are relevant goals. When they are congruent. interpretation is quick and performance is optimal, but when they are incongruent interference occurs and additional processing and time is needed to resolve the conflict, leading to a negative impact on performance. Read more »