Reading notes for Seminar 1 - Thomas Ziegelbecker

At the end of chapter 2, which describes the principles and differences of the 4 approaches to interaction design, I concluded that using User Centered Design (UCD) is the best approach to address the task at hand. The user base is narrow and the requirements are very vague. I also think that we will use elements of Genius Design (at the beginning - eventually already mocking up stuff for interviews) at some point as most of us have already experience or touched on with HCI.
I believe that Systems Design and Activity Centered Design will not play a major role in our case. As we are going do not address the masses but a particular target group.

We are certainly going to use recommendations made in chapter 4,  which is about qualitative research / Design Research - (act of investigating a product's or service's potential or existing users and the context of use) and how to prevent product lunches where it does not meet the users needs. Things that we we probably also use are:

• research hunt statement
• creat a screener - set of initial question to check the fit!
• Have a moderator script - what and in which order (incl. instruction for the interviewer)
• Keep in mind the 3 rules of DR (you go to them, you talk to them, write stuff down)
• Parts of the 3 Categories of conducting such research: Observations (fly on the wall, shadowing, ...), Interviews (Directed storytelling, unfocus group, role playing...), Activities

In Chapter 5 there are ways of how to structure research findings that tells you to look for patterns and unique phenomenon (unusual behaviour). For me i abstracted the following steps, through which we will go through in our project.

• Prepare Data (Make data physical, to be able to draw connections)
• Manipulate data (cluster, combine, juxtaposing related..) 
• Analyzing the data (analyze - e.g. alignment lists, explore - make a new whole, abstract - reduce noise). 

At the end this should lead us to a Conceptual model, which includes boundary objects, pain points, opportunities, etc., and then presented graphically (linear flow, spider, sets, venn, matrix..). Another important way to present our user group and the finding at the end is to use Personas (common set of behaviour, expectations and motivations).

Key Principles for user-centred systems design - describes an in-house software dev. project (based on RUP, with action research), lists problems, which occurred and derives 12 key principles. At the end they compare agile methods to UCSD and conclude that both can complement each other, as agile methods can compensate the missing lifcycle/longterm view of UCSD.

ISO-9241-11: gives ideas of how to define usability with a framework with measures such as effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction as outcomes. this involves description of goals, users, tasks, equipment, environments. It gives ideas of how to interpret those measures, as well as how to evaluate and specify during design. E.g with Usability Activities and Documents/Outputs

ISO-9241-210: gives normative descriptions of terms used in Human-Centred Design (HCD), as well as the rationale why to use it. It lists for instance activities and outputs of HCD and explains how it improves quality and reduces risks, as well as it underlines the importance of an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments.

Question: When should we use which research method or methods to structure our research findings in relation to our project?.