Elito method

012 min

Why research notes need the Elito method

Picture a team that has just visited eight home cooks while they prepare dinner, for an app that plans weekly meals. The team returns with pages of notes, photos and recordings. Each member remembers different moments, and the team now has to decide what to build.

That decision is where qualitative research often slows down or stops. Analysis breaks the material into facts. Synthesis combines those facts into a design direction, and it is the harder of the two steps to do in front of other people. The handbook that made the Elito method known calls the move from observation to design direction hard even for experienced teams. It presents Elito as a method that helps a team make that move while tying every decision to what the business needs.

What goes wrong when synthesis stays private

Design researcher Jon Kolko described the usual alternative in 2010. A designer reads the material alone, thinks about it, and comes back with an idea. Kolko wrote that when the work is done alone, nobody can see how the input led to the output. Clients then fail to see the link between research and design ideas, so they give less value to both.

The Elito method answers that problem by writing the link down for every observation. Kolko's paper does not mention Elito, but the problem it describes is the one the method is built for.

021 min

Where the Elito method comes from

Most designers met the Elito method in a handbook, not in research literature. Bruce Hanington and Bella Martin of Carnegie Mellon University collected 100 research and design methods in Universal Methods of Design, published by Rockport, and Elito is chapter 32 of its 2012 edition.

The handbook does not say who invented the method or what the name means, and the write-ups that repeat it say nothing more on either point. That makes Elito a method that practitioners adopted, not a research finding. The published accounts are mostly teams describing their own use in design courses, and none of the ones available online compares it with another method.

032 min

How the Elito method works

Back in the kitchen study, the team opens a spreadsheet with five columns. The method calls the five columns Elito entities, and it calls one filled row a logic line. The handbook also calls a filled row a design argument.

Each column answers one question:

• Observation: what did the team see, read or hear? This holds a plain fact, not an opinion.
• Judgment: what is the team's opinion about that observation?
• Value: what value is at work? A value is something the person cares about, such as health, delight or privacy.
• Concept or sketch: what could the design team do about it?
• Key metaphor: what short phrase or image could the team use to retell this row?

Say one visit produced this note: before cooking, a participant photographed a handwritten recipe card and put the card in a drawer. Two team members read it differently, so each fills a row.

The first row protects the card. The second row makes it readable. Neither row has been tested yet.

041 min

What the judgment column does to a team

The two rows share one observation and carry two judgments, and that difference is the reason the second column exists. One student who ran the method in a course reported that teammates often gave one observation quite different meanings. A plain list of findings records the observation and does not show the readings. The spreadsheet makes each member write down what the observation means to them, so the differences show while the team is still in the room.

In the kitchen study, the team writes two different judgments for the same observation, and they lead to different values and different concepts. One concept keeps the card safe. The other makes the card easy to read at the stove. The team can now look for other rows that support either reading, instead of following whoever speaks first.

The same feature has a cost. People who are asked for an opinion in public sometimes defend it. The student wrote that a researcher may be unable to explain their own bias during the meeting, and that this can start an argument that goes nowhere.

052 min

Running an Elito session

Rows like these take time, so the kitchen team plans a session. The handbook describes a working session held soon after the fieldwork, with a mixed team and a spreadsheet on a projector so everyone can read and edit it. One student's notes advise three or four researchers and a day or two at most, and warn that a bigger group becomes hard to run.

The team then works through four steps in order:

1. Build a spreadsheet with the five columns. An online sheet suits members who work in different places, because they can fill rows separately and merge them later.
2. Fill the observation column from field notes, recordings, transcripts and photographs, with one row for each observation.
3. For each row, write the judgment, the value, the concept and the key metaphor. Rows can be written by different people, as long as the team reads them together afterwards.
4. Stop when the data is covered. A course assignment copied into one student's notebook asked for between 25 and 50 logic lines.

What the first column must hold

The first column limits everything after it. A note such as "participant dislikes recipes" leaves nothing to judge. The same student's notes say that Elito works best with thick records, such as those from design ethnography and contextual inquiry. In the social sciences, a thick description records what people did and also the context as the people understood it, so that an outsider can follow it. Philosopher Gilbert Ryle introduced the term, and anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed it in 1973. A practical test for each observation is whether a teammate who missed the visit could write a judgment from the row alone.

061 min

Sorting Elito rows into design directions

With dozens of rows written, the kitchen team has evidence but still no direction, so the last step is sorting. One team that used the method printed the sheet, cut it into one strip per row, gave the strips labels, grouped them by label, and then brainstormed insights for each group. That team said the cutting helped them form new ideas and make new connections between rows.

In the kitchen study, rows about protecting the card go under a label such as keep card safe, and rows about reading at the stove go under easy to read. Each pile then becomes a design direction with its evidence attached. Two cautions from affinity diagramming apply here, because the sorting step is the same.

071 min

Why an Elito row counts as an argument

A pile of rows is worth acting on only if the rows can be trusted, so the next question is what a row actually claims. The handbook calls a filled row a design argument, and Kolko's account of design synthesis shows why that word fits. He called synthesis an abductive process. Abduction means reasoning from a set of facts to a best guess that goes beyond them. In an Elito row, the judgment and the value are that best guess, written where the team can read it.

A true observation can still lead to a wrong row

Kolko noted that an abductive conclusion can turn out false even when the facts behind it are true. In the kitchen study, the participant really did put the recipe card in a drawer. The judgment that the card is too precious to stain is a guess. A second visit could show that the participant puts away every piece of paper before cooking. Then the concept that protects the card solves nothing.

The spreadsheet does not prevent this. It makes the guess visible, so a teammate can challenge it with evidence from another row.

091 min

The Elito method vs. affinity diagramming

A reader who has seen the method in use will ask how it differs from the sort they already know. Affinity diagramming is the method most often placed next to Elito, because both end by grouping findings into themes. The difference is what gets grouped. Nielsen Norman Group describes affinity diagramming as organising related observations, ideas, concepts or findings into distinct clusters. A sticky note holds one finding or one idea, and members write the notes alone before the team clusters them. An Elito row holds an observation together with a judgment, a value, a concept and a key metaphor, so the argument exists before any grouping.

101 min

Two misreadings of the Elito method

The name Elito has also produced two misreadings, and each one changes what a team does in the room.

112 min

Where the Elito method breaks down

The projects described earlier also show what the method costs. The same complaints appear in several write-ups, and each has a cause.

• It is slow. One team called the analysis time consuming, and a student's notes say a session should take a day or two at most.
• Detail can pull attention from the larger pattern. A row for each observation keeps attention on single facts, and one team said it lost sight of the big picture.
• The key metaphor column often goes unused. One team did not use it in the end, and another write-up calls it the most uncertain part of the method. Skip it when it adds nothing, because the other four columns make up the argument.
• Judgments contain bias. A concept that grows from a judgment takes on whatever the judgment assumed. Sorting does not remove that. Only more evidence does.
• Large groups and loose definitions cause trouble. More than three or four researchers makes a session hard to run, and people read the column questions differently unless the team agrees on them first.
• Concepts stay tied to the people studied. Each row comes from detailed data about specific people, so the concepts are specific to them and hard to generalise.

Choose the method when you hold detailed field data, a small team and a day or two. For a quick read of a few interviews, a lighter summary such as an empathy map costs less.

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