Seminar 1 - Individual notes

This first seminar will be about the early stage of the project, for instance, the data-gathering process in the form of interviews, questionnaires and observations. These are all good methods to utilise when focusing on user-centered design as they all involve the people that will eventually use the product.

When we want to establish the user requirements of the product it's a good idea to use more than one technique, which is known as "triangulation". This way we are able to work around the strengths and weaknesses of the different techniques. If possible, we want to gather our information as a part of a field study so that we can talk directly to/observe our core demographic. 

Interviews are a form of qualitative data-gathering, where we can utilise an unstructured form, where the questions are open and our goal is to explore more thoughts and insights that the interviewee might have. Or we can use a structured form where questions are not as open, almost like a questionnaire, but we where we still have connection to the user.

When processing the information we can look for recurring patterns in both the qualitative and the quantitative (questionnaires) data. At this stage we do not have a specific product in mind, rather, we are trying to establish the requirements of the user. As this project is an iterative process we can always come back to the data-gathering step with more closed question to evaluate more specific product ideas. 

My question for the seminar is about something I encountered when interviewing people, how do we avoid them giving us "the right answer" (something they think is important to our studies) when gathering data.