Thursday 25 February 2016

Seminar 1 - Individual notes


As is to be expected, the readings helps us in the early stages of our project, mainly by describing different ways of collecting and analyzing data and establishing user requirements.

Interviews are advantageous in the beginning of a project as they don’t require too much prior knowledge in your chosen field. You can make them unstructured, with several follow-up questions to utilize the particular thoughts and experiences of each interviewee. They can also be held in the surroundings in question which gives you the opportunity to make observations. Questionnaires are useful if you have identified what specific information you require and need a larger quantity of data from a wider range of people.

 It is usually a good idea to “triangulate”, using different methods of gathering data and finding the key similarities. It is important to use different frameworks and different data-gathering and data-interpretation techniques, since these will affect what user requirements we extract, and constantly refining and revising these requirements. The gathering and interpretation of data should preferably not be done only once but several times in an iterative process.


The article about UCSD confirms the importance of making the design process both an iterative process where each iteration includes analysis, design and evaluation. They stress the benefits of active user participation; continuous interviews, observations and evaluations by the end user, and also domain experts, during the design process. A way to make this as effective and instructive as possible is simple design representation and early prototyping; from an early stage making multiple sketches, mock-ups and simulations, preferably of several design alternatives in parallel, that are easy to understand for the users as well as the design team. 

My question is how we, in the best way, can include the end users continuously in our design process?

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