Understanding how to reach others is challenging.
Our government client needed help: a solution that could be used by personnel in a variety of environments. We designed and developed P.A.S.T.
Read the paper I presented at AHFE 2015 relating to the research and design of PAST here.
Marketeers are people in a variety of domains who must use messaging to support ongoing missions worldwide (e.g., public health, diplomatic service, disaster relief) by communicating with a specific key audience. To successfully complete these missions, marketeers need to do two major tasks: (1) understand the beliefs, motivations, and outside influences (e.g., culture) that shape their key audience’s behavior, and (2) apply that understanding to create targeted messages that will resonate with the key audience.
Our software solution needed to support marketeers in minimizing their cultural biases as they conduct their key audience behavior analysis; provide operationally-relevent, actionable guidance for audience-specific message creation; and fit within the existing workflow support tools used by the community. Additionally, the solution needed to provide enough support for novice marketeers without inhibiting experts.
I began with user research. I worked closely with members of the marketeering community, conducting a mix of structured interviews and in-context observations to better understand the challenges and needs that our users face when conducting their analysis. The key factor I identified for the design was the need for a flexible, living system that users could return to over and over as they conducted their analysis; our tool needed to provide guidance on how to gather data (e.g., what sorts of questions could be used in a survey?) and then on what the resulting data could mean. Based on this research and existing domain knowledge, I felt that an analytical system validated in the social sciences and currently used in similar domains would be an excellent foundation for my design.
PAST leverages the existing process used during personality analysis to guide marketeers through development of a personality profile for their target market segment. First, during extrapolation of the market segment’s mental state, marketeers can tag each observed behavior or sentiment (e.g., behavioral facets, motivations) with factors corresponding to the personality model deriving from the FFM supplemented by the HEXACO and ZKPQ frameworks (i.e., Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Aggression-Hostility, Humility-Honesty). These six factors enable marketeers to classify market segment behaviors using a standardized personality-based framework without requiring marketeers to learn a new process or become experts in personality modeling. Once marketeers have generated a set of behaviors and motivations with or without personality factor tags, they can choose to enter a helper to further refine the target market segment personality profile. Enhancing existing processes with this tagging process while simultaneously providing the PAST helper as a complimentary step to the existing process supports both expert and novice users based on their own level of experience—expert personnel who are familiar with the personality factors and how they map to observed behaviors can tag as they complete their analysis without necessarily needing to “step back” and review their work using the helper, while novice users who are less familiar can choose to explicitly use the helper and receive more direct guidance on their behavior categorizations.