Design Tool: Formative Research with Key Influencers

5 min read (PDF)

A guide to conducting design research, including group conversations, with key influencers of adolescent girls. As with all guides in this series, this simple tool illustrates our use of formative, human-centered design research to generate insights that our team later analyzed as a group from the perspectives of our various disciplines: adolescent developmental science, socio-cultural anthropology, youth engagement, public health, and social marketing.

With this guide, we intentionally offered team members more research methods than they needed during any one conversation—so they could find the method that worked best. This gave them flexibility and the ability to conduct research in different contexts. At the end of every day, teams reconvened to discuss insights, so they could learn and refine their approach. Note: We used this process in all three countries, though the example shared here is from our Ethiopia team.