Reading notes for Seminar 1 - Alex Hoffmann

After going through the provided chapters an articles i found the following useful for the design task at hand.

In the beginning of the project we should keep our view broad and keep almost every possibility open. Since we do not have a lot of experience we will probably need several tries to get from our first idea to a proper product. It will take a lot of reconsideration and changes to get to a point where we can say that our product is presentable.

We should definitely choose the user centered approach to the problem because the project is in a field where we have no experience and we are beginners at designing as well, because of that the systems and activity centered design should not be chosen. To use the UCD we will apply the tree rules (go to them, talk to them, write stuff down). The interviews with the people in the museum have to be well prepared because the whole project will rely on the conclusions we draw from that. so we will prepare a interview script and try to get an hunt statement out of the interview. But at the same time we should not loose too much time in the first pile of data because our process will take several iterations to get to a decent result.

After the examination of the interview data we have to specify the product as soon as possible and start producing the first drafts to evaluate ideas. The team will generate a lot of different ideas because of our strongly different backgrounds so we have to rely on the insights from the interviews to pick the right way.

Since we dont know what product we will design or even the direction we might take yet, it is impossible to tell how our way after we created the personas of the persons we detected as our target group. But we have to keep the users integrated in the process so we might have to take a second round of interviews once we developed the first ideas for evaluation.

The ISO norms 9241-11 and 9241-210 propose a way to measure the efficiency of a interface to compare it and measure its outputs. As well as the normative declarations of User-centered-Design and the way how to use UCD. We can use those declarations on our later way in the project to evaluate results of iterations and decide what way to choose.

A difficult consideration is how much time and how many iterations should we spend in this early phase on the users?