America CurlNutrition profile
This asynchronous research method allows users to write their answers to a question, which gives your team insights into user's thoughts and opinions.
Cooking time
Depends on the length of time you leave the board up to receive answers to your question. It can be completed in a quick 2-hour session if you successfully recruit people to participate. In most cases, you might want to leave the board up for a week or so to reach more people and discover something deeper.
Perfect for
When you have a simple question and are looking for people's unfiltered thoughts and opinions. When you don't have a lot of time or money to spend on user interviews, or when a research method is needed that can be handled by a single person on the team. Talk-back boards are also great for new team members to tackle as an introduction to user research, as well as being a good method when social distancing is required.
Prep work
Identify a specific question to ask your users. If you are planning for ongoing research, create a backlog of questions for future talk-back boards.
In coming up with the question, consider what problems users are facing and what gaps you have in understanding of users. Next, decide whether this board will be a physical board (e.g. white board), or a digital one (e.g. Padlet), or a combination of both (e.g. answers are submitted through Google forms and written on sticky notes that are placed on the whiteboard).
Document your question and create a timeline for the research.
The setup can be a simple question at the top of the board and sticky notes that the users can write their answers on.
Ingredients
- Physical board or digital board (e.g. Google Jamboard, Miro, Padlet, Mentimeter)
- Sticky notes
- Markers
- Stickers or colored sticky dots for voting or expressing agreement (optional)
Directions
With the board ready to go, write directions for participants. This can be as simple as:
- Write your answer on a sticky note
- If you agree with another sticky note, put a sticker on it
Have the team come up with one or two answers and place them on the board so that users get an idea of what they are supposed to be doing and have a little inspiration.
For in-person recruitment, engage with users when they write down their answers so that they can learn more about the participant’s thought process for the answer they gave.
Plating
To present the information, it is helpful to take as many photos as possible of the board to preserve your data.
Next, write down all the answers given, and group them into categories. This helps to pull out any major themes from the exercise. Having your data grouped into themes makes it easier for stakeholders to understand the key takeaways from the research. Your team can also use this information and create graphs or tables that show the number of responses, the number of similar responses, or the categories with the most responses. A word cloud can be another creative way to visualize your data.
Pro tips
- Be mindful of the content that is placed on the board. Some of it might be of a sexual or violent nature, so it is important for the team to think about how they will deal with this information beforehand.
- Think about how this information will be used. Will actual changes be made based on the information that users give, or is it more of an exploratory activity?
- Create a dedicated space to put all the notes and images from these activities. Your team may find that they may want to explore an answer given or revisit a previous question.
- Get creative with how people can express themselves, trying different visuals to fit the prompt such as timelines, grids, or matrixes.
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