- One of the first steps of any research process
is to establish which you need to learn
in order to solve your problem.
The key to be successful with this
is to have a clear well-defined problem.
With the descriptive problem statement,
it's much easier to realize which you already know
and, more importantly, what you do not.
Realizing this will empower you to create a research plan
that has learning goals which will directly inform
how you solve your problem.
So we're going to look at a tool called a KWHL table.
A KWHL table organizes your initial ideas
into these four categories.
What do you already know?
What do you need to find out?
How will you learn it?
And what did you learn from it?
Let's check this out in action.
We've been tasked with redesigning a way finding system
to help direct people through a busy train station.
We can use the KWHL table to help to find
what we already know and what you need to know
in order to assessing goals for our research process.
Let's start by looking
at what we already know about this problem.
As you come up with ideas, we'll put them into the chart.
We know that there's a mixture of both local
and international passengers using the station.
We also know that it connects people
to an international airport, shopping centers,
local museums, and other city sites.
We know that it's a large space.
We know that it connects to a few
other public transit systems.
And we assume that we'd have a variety of needs
and addition to finding major destinations
such as locating bathrooms, ticket counters,
and food vending areas.
Okay, now let's look at what we don't know.
And again, we'll fill up the chart as we go.
What we don't know is where exactly
the majority of the passengers come from,
what languages they speak.
How they currently navigate through the station.
Where the current system fails.
How familiar they are with public transportation.
All of the possible destinations they may go to.
And how crowded the station gets.
Now some of the information you enlist here
might not always be relevant.
You may need to work through a couple of iterations
before you've compiled a list that will only include
the relevant questions to solve in this project.
Our next step then is to write down
how we intend to learn this.
For example, we might consider interviewing
some of the passengers to see
what languages are predominantly spoken.
How many times they use the train station
and how often they have trouble navigating the station.
This could also help us figure out
what some of the existing system breaks down.
We could also consider asking some of those questions
with the survey, especially questions
like nationality and how often they use the train.
Those are simple close-ended questions
that are great to ask in a survey.
Observations will help to get a better sense
of how people navigate through the space
and where major decision making points are.
It's important to think about which tools work best
for the kind of information we're collecting
and the restraints of a project.
So at this point, we're pairing questions with tools
and sources in order to find our what we're looking for.
The final step then is to write down what you hope to learn
from the information that you seek.
By learning how many visitors are international
or do not speak the native language, we hope to determine
how visual our sign system should be.
Or by learning where the existing station system fails,
we hope to learn where redesign system
should be more effective.
This is simply another way to check yourself and say,
"So if I do this, what is it that I'm trying to learn
"and does it make sense if I think
"about the goals of this project?"
So again, KWHL tables are a great way to recognize
and separate assumptions from facts which you know
from things that you don't and be able to create a plan
and seek answers to the goals of your project.
You need interviews to figure this out,
surveys to figure out that, observations to check
and make sure you are correct, and so on.
The KWHL table can feel like an extra step.
But I'll tell you from my experience,
it's a very valuable tool to make an overwhelming task
to much more manageable.