Reading notes for Seminar 1 - Jessie Pease

After reading about the different approaches to interaction design, it seems that for our project with the museums, it might be best to use user-centered design or activity-centered design. The genius design approach is definitely too advanced for our level of knowledge. UCD gives good structure for the problem we are trying to solve at museums. 

Throughout our design process, we will do research in which we will interview and observe our users, analyze the results, make conclusions about user’s needs, brainstorm possible design solutions, define and set goals for design, build the design, test design with users, refine design (complete that process multiple times), and finally have a working prototype or solution. Throughout the design process, it is helpful to have a “hunt statement.” For our group, Swedish Blondies, it might be something like, “We are going to research how children interact with exhibits at the Natural History Museum of Stockholm so that we can help improve their interaction experience.”

Throughout our research it would be helpful to follow some guidelines suggested by the reading. Some good guidelines were:

• Be overly prepared for interviews (with pens, paper, recording equipment, etc)
• Work in pairs so that we get different perspectives on the same feedback from users
• Choose a variety of user-subjects to interview that all fall into our sub-group we are researching
• Ask unbiased questions
• As “how,” “what,” and “why” questions instead of yes/no questions
• Do not make subjects do any work; we need to approach them and record their answers
• Observe potential users in the environment. Observe their interactions with the environment as well as the users as people. 

Once our user observations and interviews are complete, that is when we can start our conclusion making. The best way to do this is to physically organize all of our interviews and observations on a board using post-its and physical notes that we can organize. This makes it much easier to draw conclusions. 

Throughout the entire process we need to remember that we are thinking of ergonomics of design and also doing a human-centered design process. Since we are making a product for users, they should be the center of our research, design, and testing processes. 

After creating a product, we want to measure success by looking at effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of users. Each these categories has different ways of measuring success. I learned how to measure such successes using those categories in the ISO documents. In short, effectiveness is how successful was the user at completing a task. Efficiency is measured in how long it took or how much effort was put into completing a task. Finally, satisfaction is measured by, "the extent to which users are free from discomfort..." (ISO-9241-11).

Questions:

• Is it appropriate to ask users if they have a design solution themselves while we are interviewing them? 
• Users will likely have different preferences, so is part of the testing process designing for approval from the masses?