The first reading seminar concerns the first steps of an
interaction design project; data gathering, data analysis and establishing requirements.
To obtain good data there’s three main techniques; interviews,
questionnaires and observations. Often more than one technique is used to
validate results of some inquiry by exploring similar results, also known as
triangulation.
Interviews can be unstructured (using lots of open questions
and leaves room to explore insights from interviewee) or structured where
questions are usually closed and has options. I’d say the best is somewhere in between
collecting both quantitative data and a more what motivates those answers,
qualitative data. Questionnaires was an especially interesting section; interactive
web-based questionnaires have some great benefits although the main problem is
the difficulty of obtaining a random sample of respondents.
To process the gathered data the method varies with the
technique used for collecting. From audio and video there’s possible to extract
both qualitative and quantitative data. The latter is easier to transcript and present
as graphs or similar. For qualitative data on the other hand one must first
identify recurring patterns or themes to be able sorting the data.
In chapter 10 the authors point out the importance of
establishing requirements. There’re two main aims; understand as much as
possible about the users and secondly to produce a set of stable requirements
that form a sound basis to start designing. Doing a proper foundation for the
project is both cost effective and professional because what a “customer”
think/mean/says they want may differ.
To establish requirements, it’s a good idea to discuss both
functional and nonfunctional requirements. It’s often intuitive to use scenarios,
which is described as an informal narrative description in the context of use.
My question to the seminar: How can one minimize the effect
that our data gathering technique has on the respondents?
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