Challenge Activity
I decided to pull together my own brief for this module. My mum has recently qualified to teach Reiki healing and has been seeking a digital product to help support her student's education beyond the single day face to face session she has with them. You can view the Google Doc containing my full project brief with additional context and background here. With this in mind I wanted to tailor this activity so the research and insights gained will inform my project. After speaking further to my mother about her needs I pulled together this initial user problem statement:
"I need a way to continue my reiki education beyond the single day of face to face learning I currently have."
The nature of my brief means I have access to a large number of willing participants who have either completed earlier versions of the course I'm looking to improve or are looking to gain the qualification in the future. Because of this and because most have a close relationship with my mother I found approaching people for interviews and research pretty easy and painless and I was able to schedule plenty of interviews pretty quickly.
Stage One: User Interviews & SURVEY
Despite managing to line up a number of interviews with users I was a bit nervous about this element of the task. I'm a naturally very introverted person so I knew I'd need to overcome that in order to give the best possible interview.
1. Who are they? Age/Gender Identity/Profession
2. Why do they want to learn reiki healing?
3. How do they intend to use their reiki healing qualification?
4. When do they study?
5. How do they prefer to learn? Visual/Physical/Audio
6. What devices would they be using to access online learning?
7. What brought them to reiki healing?
Maria Rosala identifies one of the biggest mistakes in crafting user interview questions as asking questions that "should be asked in a screener survey". Closed questions with only a finite amount of possible answers could be answered by my interviewees in advance giving me more time to explore tangents and delve a little deeper into the insights that couldn't be gathered by simpler methods. With this in mind I decided to do a survey as well as interviews and split my questions between the two methods depending on the most efficient and effective way to gather that information. I decided to let the interview questions guide me using the interviewing techniques outlined in the course material such as - - to delve deeper into the answers and let the conversation evolve.
I think my interview style improved a lot by the fourth interview, it felt a lot more natural and I noted down far more insights for the last two interviews. I think the first interview was great practice but in the short time we had together I didn't get around to everything I wanted to ask however this meant in subsequent interviews I was far more mindful of my time keeping.
Sending out my survey results prior to the interviews really helped me check a lot of my assumptions.
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Stage Two: Affinity Mapping
I created a post-it note in Miro for each insight/observation/behaviour I took note of throughout my four initial user interviews. I then began to sort each post-it into groups using first person statements to describe the motivations and behaviours reflected in those groups.
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Surprisingly the first thing I noticed was that all of my participants felt failed in some way by more socially accepted avenues of medical treatment and turned to reiki as a result of that. In some cases it was grief or trauma they didn't feel properly supported with until they had a reiki treatment, in others it was chronic pain they felt doctors and medical professionals dismissed. This also fed into their reasons for wanting to learn reiki healing- a desire to share the benefits they've found with others. After identifying this common theme amongst all participants I did some further research and found that this isn't an uncommon pathway into holistic and complementary therapies, particularly for women. Arianne Shahvisi highlights in her 2019 research paper on the subject "..many of those who choose [alternative medicine] do so following a long period of unsatisfactory encounters with medical professionals as they pursue the treatment or resolution of long-term chronic ailments. The majority of these patients are women." (ShahvisI, A. 2019) While Shahvisi goes on to criticise the effectiveness of alternative medicine and therapies as the answer to this lack of trust in standard medicine, after interviewing respondents that have faced medical misogyny and found some sense of solace and comfort in Reiki practice I firmly believe that they deserve a digital tool to support them in the learning and dissemination of that knowledge.
In addition all of my interviewed users are interested in at least one other aspect of spirituality or mysticism and their involvement with reiki complements similar interests and practices such as crystal healing. This affirmed my findings in the survey I conducted with 23 participants prior to the interviews. The younger female interviewees were more likely to report an interest in Wicca and witchcraft specific pursuits and cited that as a motivating factor in wanting to study reiki, this revelation was less of a shock to me. As part of that same demographic I have noticed something of a resurgence of interest in witchcraft amongst millennial women over the last decade.
Most of them were largely motivated by the existing brand and presence my mum has already created, finding her really personally engaging and comforting. I concluded from this that her brand and her personality should be present in the final product.
Most were looking to fill available time they had, one was unemployed looking to set up their own business with this qualification, two were retired looking for a small side business or hobby, one was working part time and looking to supplement her income with something she was passionate about. A clear entrepreneurial spirit was present in all participants with all of them hoping to generate some income from the skills they learn on the course.
ReFERENCES
ROSALA Maria. Neilson Norman Group (2022) '6 Mistakes When Crafting Interview Questions' [online] Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/interview-questions-mistakes/ [Accessed: March 12th 2022]
CLARKE, Victoria and Virginia BRAUN. (2013) ‘Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners’ [online]. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256089360_Successful_Qualitative_Research_A_Practical_Guide_for_Beginners
ShahvisI, A. (2019) 'Medicine is Patriarchal, But Alternative Medicine is Not the Answer. Bioethical Inquiry' 16, 99–112 [online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-018-9890-5
ALOI, Peg. Medium (2018) 'As More Women Embrace Witchcraft, Is Another Satanic Panic Looming?' [online] Available at: https://medium.com/the-establishment/as-more-women-embrace-witchcraft-is-another-satanic-panic-looming-69b0856383e0