AbstractThis study presents a qualitative design thinking technique to help system designers explore hidden influences on users’ decision-making processes. This technique targets context-specific influences that have accumulated in the absence of conscious reflection, and hence may exist without users’ awareness. Such processes may lie outside the reach of traditional discursive approaches; thus, our technique augments existing approaches with a method for ‘lesioning’ information sources, i.e. removing specific information sources and observing how and when users’ decision-making behaviour breaks down. This deconstruction allows dependencies to be exposed, allowing a better understanding of hidden influences, which can then be assimilated into design ideation. The lesioning technique is tested and demonstrated over multiple experimental iterations in the context of Twitter, a leading social media service. These iterations present several insights and design opportunities surrounding how users determine wh...
['Rob Gleasure', 'Sheila O’Riordan']
Exploring hidden influences on users’ decision-making: A feature-lesioning technique to assist design thinking