Are your users digital natives? Here’s a 15 minute workshop to find out

I’ve just started working on a product that’s going to be used by people who tell me that they don’t use technology. I’m a little freaked out by this revelation. Our initial hypothesis is based on a technical solution, because we assumed a basic level of digital fluency.

Should we instead be focused on something much lower tech? This would definitely have much less of an impact on the problem the users are facing, but at least they might stand a chance of using it. Should we be taking baby steps to technically up-skill our users?

But then I thought of other self-proclaimed tech luddites in my life. Like my grandmother, who nonetheless uses Facebook and researches antiques online. She’d never claim to be a fluent digital native. But she’s definitely able to do the digital language equivalent of ordering food in a restaurant or asking for directions to the train station. She’s studied the phrase book and knows enough to get herself around.

So here’s the challenge: how do you get a bunch of users who tell you they don’t use tech to take a ‘digital citizenship test’? Perhaps they can only speak in one technology ‘dialect’, like web applications they use for work. Or maybe their vocabulary is limited to certain specific interactions, like ordering shopping. We needed a test that answered questions like;

• Do they recognise the visual language of apps?
• Do they trust technology enough to give it their credit card details?
• Are they comfortable using technology regularly as part of their daily lives

And we needed it to feel more like a conversation than a test… because nobody likes taking a test!

So we came up with this 15m workshop using a grid to map the digital fluency of our sample user group. The basic idea is that we ask users to show us how they do a series of day to day tasks. Their options go from the most basic (go to a place and talk to a person) to the most ‘tech fluent’ option of using a mobile app on a touchscreen device. They map their behaviour on the grid using postits, and write on each postit what brand they interact with to do that task.

What we end up with is an overview of:

• General level of tech engagement of our users
• Whether they use tech consistently or just for specific tasks
• Which brands they interact with, so we can get a view of the design patterns they will recognise
• What proportion use technology to make payments

What did we find? Well it turned out that the majority of our user group were actually much more tech-engaged than they thought they were. They were surprised themselves! We had a strong clustering of postits in the top layer of our mapping (the mobile and desktop interfaces) and the majority of users engaged with more than one major tech brand on a regular basis to do a variety of day to day tasks.

Great news for our first iteration! Now we could go ahead with our mobile-based prototyping with a clear sense of the visual language and functionality that our users are familiar with.

We followed this up with a survey to a wider group of users to validate that our sample reflects the broader user base.

I’m sure there are other (probably more specialist and detailed) versions of this exercise out there — feel free to comment below and share the knowledge!