Deep Listening

The Problem

Bluetooth wireless technology is made possible through the collaboration of engineers representing different member companies, living and working across time zones all over the world. These engineers create the Bluetooth specifications developers use to build products that work seamlessly together.

The Bluetooth SIG provides several collaboration tools to assist engineers with things like document management, planning, and real-time collaboration.

As the newly assigned lead designer, I was tasked with improving these tools. There was just one problem: our team didn’t have a clear understanding of how the tools were actually used throughout specification development, or where we had the best opportunities to make a real impact.

Before deciding what to improve, I needed to understand the problem space.

The Right Tool

We decided to create a mental model diagram that would help us:

• Model real user behavior in the specification development process
• Map the solutions our tools provided
• Identify opportunities by finding gaps between user behavior and our solutions

Mental model diagrams, developed by researcher Indi Young, model how users think, including their reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles, and compare that thinking against the solutions an organization provides to support them.

When areas of user thinking don’t have solutions mapped to them, those gaps can reveal opportunities for the organization to better support its users.

For a team trying to understand both an unfamiliar problem space and how well our existing products supported it, this gave us a useful framework for connecting research directly to product opportunities.

Listening Without Leading

To create the top half of the diagram and model how our users thought about developing specifications, we started by identifying interview candidates.

We created proto-personas to help guide recruitment and conducted 12 user interviews, ensuring that each proto-persona and its characteristics were represented in our candidate pool.

Because we wanted to model how our users thought about developing Bluetooth specifications, we didn’t want to bias them with leading interview questions.

We used a non-directed interview style, kicking off each session with a high-level prompt about specification development and then allowing the user to lead the discussion.

That gave people room to talk about what mattered to them, rather than simply responding to what we already thought might matter.

Finding the Patterns

Once we completed our interviews, I began analyzing the transcripts.

I combed through each one for quotes that described the user’s thinking, focusing specifically on three core concepts: reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.

After highlighting these quotes, I copied them into a separate document, labeled them, and began the process of summarizing them.

The summaries helped draw out the insight or intent behind each quote and made the growing amount of research much easier to understand and remember.

Once all of the quotes were summarized, I started identifying patterns. I grouped similar quote summaries together into a first level of groupings, then created another level by matching together similar concepts from those initial groups.

With the analysis complete, I shifted to generating the diagram itself.

The first set of quote groups became towers, and groups of towers became larger mental spaces.

The resulting diagram turned a mountain of quotes into something closer to an affinity diagram. It made high-level thinking concepts clear, but still invited people to dig into the underlying research.

Mapping Our Solutions

With our model of user thinking complete, we shifted to understanding how our organization’s existing tools and resources supported those towers and mental spaces.

I worked with our product and program managers to create a list of all the features and solutions we offered to members involved in developing Bluetooth specifications.

Then, over the course of several workshops, we thoughtfully aligned each solution beneath the corresponding towers.

This was where the diagram started becoming more than a research artifact.

We could see not only how people thought about specification development, but where our products supported that thinking, where the support was weak, and where we weren’t helping at all.

Finding the Gaps

With the diagram completed, we finalized the formatting and dug into it as a team.

We found that some areas were well supported with solutions, some were weakly supported, and a few weren’t supported at all.

There were even cases where we had solutions or features that didn’t align to any user thinking at all.

We created a list of the major gaps illustrated by the diagram and prioritized them. For the first time, we had a research-backed picture of the key areas where our tools could better support the people developing Bluetooth specifications.

The resulting priorities and insights were especially powerful when combined with other types of research. Our team ended up revising major sections of our product roadmap and backlogs to account for the opportunities we’d identified.

The diagram also continued to serve as a tool for prioritizing future work and determining where we needed additional user research.

What started as an effort to understand an unfamiliar problem space gave us something much more useful: a shared model of our users that could help the team decide what to build next.

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