The Challenge

Well, this isn’t fair

‍

Women are more risk-averse when it comes to participating in negotiation events and research shows women actually negotiate less often than men across a variety of situations. This tendency perpetuates inequality such as the disparities in leadership and wage gap between men and women. We conducted qualitative research on women’s experiences, feelings, and knowledge of negotiation and found that women regard negotiation skills as valuable and pertinent to a wide variety of contexts but don’t know how to use them. Something is missing. How can we use HCI strategies to close the knowledge and confidence gap women experience when negotiating?

The Users

Target Users: Female students ages 18 and older.

In our first round of interviews, I conducted 4 out of 15 interviews with female students to get a better understanding of their feelings towards and experiences with negotiating. I co-wrote our interview script, which encouraged storytelling and guided conversation with participants.

‍

UX Research

Identifying the problem

We conducted background research by reading academic articles, conducting a competitive analysis with other digital negotiation tools, and completed a heuristic evaluation of the CoEx lab's current negotiation learning platform– the PROGRESS webpage. The Program for Research and Outreach on Gender Equity in Society (PROGRESS) was established by Dr. Linda C. Babcock in 2006 to empower women and girls through the art of negotiation. The website provides educational modules to help women and girls learn about negotiation and practice their skills.

‍

‍

‍

Competitive Analysis

Negotiation learning tools do exist today, however, a tool that optimizes opportunities for learning and practical implementation can be challenging to find, as there are little to no tools focused on equipping women with negotiation skills. A competitive analysis of negotiation learning tools suggests there is a lot of room for opportunity when it comes to building a dynamic tool that effectively teaches women how to negotiate. Most of the learning tools that exist today require paid subscriptions to access core content, use out-dated and unrealistic scenarios that are difficult for users to relate to or apply, or for private use by various companies and academic groups. Restrictions and limitations such as these further contribute to the perpetuation of disparities present in negotiation success between men and women. Merely understanding the problem is not sufficient for counteracting societal patterns.

‍

Insights from User Research

1. Women do not feel confident or well-equipped as negotiators.

2. Women feel hesitant and unprepared entering negotiation situations.

3. Women understand it takes confidence, determination, and compromise in order to have a successful negotiation.

Define

We combined all of our research and observed where our target users’ problems existed. We analyzed our insights by way of affinity diagramming — which is a method to help gather large amounts of data and organize them into groups or themes based on their relationships.

Design

Ideation

To start our design stage, I facilitated and guided team members through a Crazy 8s rapid sketching activity in order to brainstorm solution ideas. The goal is to push oneself creatively and generate a wide range of unique solutions. Each team member sketched 8 distinct ideas in 8 minutes. Ideas ranged from live negotiation competitions to interactive negotiation games. We then transformed these solutions into storyboards. These storyboards portrayed different scenarios in which women could further develop their negotiation skills.

‍

Solution - Negotiation Art

A mobile learning tool that empowers long women by teaching them the art of negotiation.

Prototyping

I used Figma to design various screens and key features of our prototype mostly being the Learning Modules and Quiz screens.

Usability Testing

We returned to our users for feedback. To test the efficacy and intuitiveness of our mobile toolkit, we relied on users’ Think-Alouds to understand how our design concepts were received.

Think-Alouds are usability sessions where users are given a few tasks to complete, and are asked to think aloud, as a means to navigate an interactive prototype. From this, we were able to gather insights on the usability of the negotiation toolkit.

Lesson Modules

Our first few iterations included learning modules that were reading-based. Users were to read the lesson content and take a short quiz at the end of each module. My experience in education (teaching) and Cognitive Science enhanced our design by making the reading-based lessons more interactive and engaging. After receiving feedback that the lessons were text-heavy and not conducive for on-the-go learning, I began to add questions and other interactive learning activities within the lessons.

‍

Quizzes

Originally, our team thought it conventional to have a knowledge test at the end of each learning module. I designed the quizzes to be short with just up to 5 questions at most. I implemented user feedback to make the answer input interactions simple and clear: a user would tap their intended answer and confirm it before submitting it for review. Their answer (if incorrect) would be highlighted in red, and the correct answer, in green.

The design iterations for the quizzes came to a halt after our decision to integrate quiz-like questions and interactions within the learning modules.

Audio Lessons

The audio lessons provided users with a multimodal way for learning negotiation content and gaining the necessary conversation skills. Audio lessons were designed to mimic negotiation exchanges between two people, while users act as flies on the wall and learn from generated first-hand experiences.