Raw notes from seminary 1

Interviews gave us only quantitative data, but this is ok at the start of a project. It will be necessary to, later in the project,

Setting goals is an important part of the start of a project, the chapters indicated that you have to know what you want to get out of, for example, the interviews.

Data Gathering

Data gathering was presented and the different methods for doing it. Variations on Interviews, Questionnares and Observation.

Discussion about data gathering techniques, and that there are other ways of learning about the users than the mentioned three Discussion about Observing, and specifically “insider observing”. It’s a good way to learn by first-person perspective, but not always possible to achieve.

We can avoid poeple trying to please us with theur answers by not having them know they’rebeing analyzed. For example, using indirect observation or pretending not to be an interviewer but a participant.

Data Analysis

Data analysis was presented later, which was how we should interpret the data we gather and draw conclusions from it.

The chapters talked a lot about different kinds of data, how to analyze each kind, and which data gathering techniques resulted in what kinds. Differences between functional and nonfunctional requrements, and that it’s not always necessary to distill specific functional requirements. Qualitative feedback can be used to ground presented results in realify, and add life to them. Is can also be analyzed more broadly by grouping or tagging the data, and analyzing the resulting groups.

Shame that a lot is missing in the book: data gathering from forums or users submitting bugs (this is moslt later in product stages), a lot to get from there.

Establishing Requirements

Establishing requirements was then about what we should do with the insights we’ve gathered. It was also about presenting these insights to the stakeholders etc and finding out about what is best for this project.

WIth infinite resources, we could use the data that SL gathers about how people use the subway and when they travel. We could isolate the people travelling at rush hour, and contact those with interviews or invites to observation experiments. If we want to test some ideas we have, we could invite people to a artificially contructed testing environment, or even stress-test it with huge amounts of people. A method we could use is developing a questionnary that we would print on flyers, and hand out on the subway (and then collect). This way, we would get a lot of quantitative answers, but of ourse, the design of the questions is crucial. A downside to this is that, if we focus on people travelling as rush hour, it might be hard to get answers from them because they are in a hurry (and it might be easier to perform the study at a calmer time of day).

It might be possible to, by way of analysis, extract some quantitative data from the interviews performed. One could for example try to approximate people’s stance to a certain subject.