Human Values
An investigation into the implications and alternatives of measuring success based on vanity metrics, such as time spent, when looking to foster long term engagement and loyalty with digital products and services.
A quick introduction
We used this introduction on the humanvalues.io resources, and at the start of presentations, to give an overview of what the work was looking to achieve.
Challenge Statement
How might evaluating a product or service with metric which go deeper than behavioural measures transform decision making and move understanding beyond surface level assumptions?
BBC R&D mobilised a research team to go beyond the ‘easy to observe and easy to measure’ behavioural metrics to identify where people might be acting the same way as others but have different intentions, motivations or needs.
Action
Starting with desk research into existing psychological models, (e.g. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs) we built a framework of interviews and playful interventions to act as a gateway to understanding core values.
We conducted contextual interviews with 18-35 year olds to probe where values flex and change throughout their lived experiences, and went on to apply these interviews with wider age ranges at similar life stages (for example people starting new careers, moving home or starting a family)
We then used the commonalities and differences in these findings to build the Human Values framework, consisting of 14 core values, relevant to people in the digital world.
Outputs
humanvalues.io
Open source website with everything you need to pick up and use human values in your own work
Human Values Research Findings
72 questions about the impact of your product
Results
NESTA funded project to apply values driven metrics to other industries
Invited to tun 20+ human values workshops around BBC and partners
Values tags added to BBC internal CMS, to aid content discovery relevant to core values