Meeting, 26th February 2016

Interviews

Target group: (to be decided)
Every group member must get at least one interview recorded for transcription.

Frågeformulär:

Presentation

Inspelningsförfrågan 

• Bor du i Stockholm?
• Om nej - var bor du?

• Varför valde du att åka båt idag?
• Hur ofta gör du det?

• Hur planerade du din resa idag?
• Nämn det du tycker var det sämsta med båtupplevelsen.

• Nämn det du tycker var det bästa med båtupplevelsen.

Seminar 1 Questions

Are structured or unstructured interviews more useful for us when developing our product?

We will conduct unstructured interviews as a start to hopefully find a focus group and which direction the project should take. Later on more structured interviews to develop the product. (p. 233 - 234, Price Rogers Sharp, 4th edition)

What kind of interview or questionnaire is best suited to collect more data?

Maybe a questionnaire to complement the interviews to collect more quantitative data. This would be done handing out sheets to the passengers on the ferry. (p. 270, Price Rogers Sharp, 4th edition)

Eftersom vi har en begränsad tid att utföra intervjun hur ser man till att få ut så många bra svar som möjligt utan att det skall kännas stressande för de tillfrågade?

Well prepared, and make the interview clearly structured to avoid getting off topic. Few questions. (p. 238, Price Rogers Sharp, 4th edition)

How can we involve our users in an effective way?

In this instance of the project we can only use the interviews, but later maybe something more specific.

What is the best approach to continue the project if the requirements are starting to become too difficult to accomplish?

If the requirements would be too difficult to handle we as a group would have to consider what is realistic and tone the requirements down a bit to a manageable level, but still maintaining the core idea.

Which are the optimal ways of gathering data for this project? Should we for example consider questionnaires?

How should we establish our requirements in a manageable way?

In this first run we as a group thinks we should consider only using the interview style. But in later stages of the project a questionnaire could be useful. Because of the quality/quantity in the different styles.

How can we minimize “dissonance” in the data gathering (i.e have as little influence as possible towards the ones answering the questions)?

We should use a non academic language and try to be as inviting as possible. We have also discussed using fika as a means to get the interview more relaxed.

Seminar 1

Old version of the book

An interaction design process usually goes through many iterations of design, data gathering, data interpretation, design and redesign and continuous analysis of what needs to be changed.

In the book, several methods for gathering data are discussed. Triangulation , combining different kinds of data gathering, is often useful. For getting quantitative data with answers to specific questions from a large group of people questionnaires are good. Interviews are good if you want more qualitative data. In structured interviews predetermined questions are asked, like in questionnaires. Unstructured interviews are more like conversations around a topic. In semi- structured interviews some predetermined questions are asked, but there is also some discussion and supplementary questions. Group interviews and workshops are usually like unstructured interviews with conversations around a topic or like semi-structured interviews with some predetermined questions.

Naturalistic observation means observing the user in the environment where they use a product. The observer can be either an insider or an outsider. In order to get the most out of a data gathering session, it is good to have a framework with the most important things to focus on, for example who is doing something, where they are, and what they're doing. 

Video recording,  diaries and interaction logs are also useful when gathering data.

Question: Are structured or unstructured interviews more useful for us when developing our product?

The Premier Ferry Trip

The First Ferry Trip 

Unfortunately both Maria and Tom were unable to attend our premier ferry trip, but their time will come. As seen in the picture below, it was a lovely day for a boat trip in Stockholm. We can already see Carl and Trolle struggling with the ticket machine, but that might be the topic for another day. Written on the ferry we could see that Waxholmsbolaget is the company managing the boats.

Some pictures were taken on signs regarding the ticket system. Are they comprehensible? Do they achieve their purpose in an optimal way? All these questions... 

Also, the ticket machines. 

Proceeding, we find ourselves in the ferry's "queue system". Basically a U-turn with a fence in between. Here we could see our first sample of the population. One school class, a small group of presumably teenagers, some old folks, tourists and what we can consider as "normal" people - unclassified for now. At 12:24 the ferry departed for Djurgården, and the excitement was astounishing.

During the boat-ride about half of the passengers stood on the deck enjoying the view and talking to each other,  the second half stayed inside doing things like sitting down talking, using their phones and looking outside the windows. Also some people seemed to be doing nothing special at all, just sitting doing nothing.


We spoke to the ferry-woman managing the gates when we arrived at Djurgården and asked if it would be possible to speak to the captain and see the cockpit. She said it could be possible if we just ask them beforehand. This is something we definitely should do in the future since it would pose a great opportunity for a naturalistic observation of the captain and his cockpit. We asked the same woman what she believed was the most frequent group of people which she answered with "Mostly school-classes, but also "normal people"". We didn't push our inquiry further after her response because she needed to attend to new passengers. We can however note that school-classes seem to be a notable part of the population.

We ended our first meeting at a local restaurant discussing what we had experienced.

Seminar 1

(Older edition)

Chapter 7 - Identifying needs and establishing requirements

This chapter mainly discusses requirements and data gathering. A requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform, as stated in 7.3. There are traditionally two different kinds of requirements in software engineering that have been identified; functional requirements and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements tell us what a system should do, and the non-functional requirements tell us about the constraints on the system and its development. These two requirements hold more specific types of requirements however, such as data requirements, environmental requirements and user requirements. 

There are several kinds of different data-gathering techniques. Each one has its pros and cons. Questionnaires, interviews,  focus groups and workshops, naturalistic observation and studying documentation are some examples of those techniques.

Chapter 13 - Asking users and experts

This chapter focuses on interviewing techniques. How to develop and plan an interview is explained, and some simple steps one can use to conduct a better interview experience for the interviewee are presented. The steps are in order; introduction, warmup session, main session, cool-offperiod and closing session.

Interviews can be structured, unstructured or semi-structured. Structured interviews are similar to questionnaires in that the questions are predefined and is often used when the study's goals are clearly understood. Closed questions are typically used in structured interviews. It's important that the same questions are used for each participant for a standardized study. Unstructured interviews resemble normal conversations and use more open questions. It is advisable to have a clear interview agenda to stay "on topic". A great benefit with this kind of interview is a richer data and often new ideas never considered pop up. On the other hand a very time-consuming interview and more difficult to analyze, hence a proper structure and preparation is required for maximum efficiency. Semi-structured interviews combine aspects of both previously mentioned interview types and pose both closed and opened questions. The questions are preplanned and the interviewer uses probing to obtain more relevant information. It's important here not to phrase questions which expects particular answers.

Questionnaires have the advantage to be distributable to a much larger number of people. However, the questions need to be carefully thought out  to ensure that the data can be analyzed efficiently. People are also not as prone to complete questionnaires as they are answering questions asked by an interviewer.

Our group chose the ferry route Slussen to Allmäna Gränd since we thought that it would be easier and nicer for everyone to conduct interviews on the ferry rather than a train or bus. We will go to Slussen and take the ferry to document the surroundings and to hopefully find a clear and distinct focus group. We will perform a naturalistic observation to help identify and establish our requirements by collecting qualitative data when observing the ferry population. The next phase is to come up with an interview template, preferably a strucutred or semi-structured one. If the focus group happens to travel in smaller groups the interviews could be done as smaller workshops, but it could dilute the interviews too much.

How should we establish our requirements in a manageable way?
What kind of interview or questionnaire is best suited to collect more data?

Seminar 1

(Jag lånade en bok av äldre upplaga till detta seminarium)

I dessa kapitel diskuteras på vilka sätt man kan samla på sig data samt hur denna data sedan kan processeras.

Vid insamlingen av data kan man t.ex använda sig av intervjuer, frågeformulär, fokusgrupper och läsa dokumentation. När man samlar in data från flera olika sätt kallas det för triangulering.

Beroende på både i vilken fas i projekt man är samt vad det är man vill få svar på kan ge klarhet till vad för typ av datainsamling man skall utföra.

Frågeformulär kan vara bra då man vill nå ut till en stor mängd personer. I formulären kan vi även ställa så kallade rankningsfrågor (rating scales), vilket är frågor där svararen får kryssa i en siffra ur en skala där ändarna är extremer.

T.ex Vad tycker du om MDI?

Mycket dåligt(1 2 3 4 5)Mycket bra

Vi kan även samla på oss mycket information genom att observera hur saker görs. Det kan vara svårt att förklara för en frågeställare exakt hur man utför en viss uppgift och då kan det vara lättare att genom att följa med personen få en helhetsuppfattning på vad som görs och hur. Och kan även be personen tänka högt(Think-aloud technique).

(T.ex tjejen som det berättades om på föreläsningen som sa att hon använde en bok för att slå upp felmeddelande. Men vid observation ropad hon på en kollega för att få hjälp.)

När vi har samlat in data så ska vi först kategorisera datat(Categorization data), efter sortering är det lättare att processera den insamlade datan.

Vid processering av det insamlade datat så skall man leta efter återkommande mönser(Recurring patterns) för att kunna fastslå vad en grupp tycker. Det skulle vara t.ex att frågade personer över 30 gillar Skurt mer än Kalle Anka.

Eftersom vi har en begränsad tid att utföra intervjun hur ser man till att få ut så många bra svar som möjligt utan att det skall kännas stressande för de tillfrågade?

Reading seminar 1

I have focused on reading the three articles provided.

Out of the three, I found Key principles for user-centered system design the most interesting and useful. The article brings up, as the title suggests, a list of principles to define user-centered system design (UCSD), but also descriptions of some problems the people behind the article ran into during their project and suggestions on how to apply UCSD.

Emphasis is put on the importance of involving users in the design process. This also introduces the need of easy-to-understand design representations and terminology — the future users who are involved in the design process should have no problem understanding the project. As we are going to be doing interviews with the target group of our product it might be a good idea to consider this, even though our projects may not be as complicated as the one in the article.

The usage of an activity list is suggested as a means of introducing each key principle into the project,  and includes specific methods on how to achieve this. This can be used as a checklist throughout the project. I believe using an activity list could help us structure out project as well.

The list of the problems encountered might not entirely apply to our project, as we won’t be working in the same way and most likely won’t even have a finished product in the end, but I still think it is worth taking into consideration, if only to have something to reflect on.

Ouestion: How can we involve our users in an effective way?

Semiar 1

In chapter seven relevant points regarding data collection were mentioned. The book goes through three different methods for data gathering, interviews, questionnaires and observations. Whichever method you use, it's important to consider: Who the participants (population) should be and how to proceed in selecting them. In most cases having a contract for the participant stating what will be done with their information and how e.g. the interview will go is also good practice. Doing a pilot study to ensure that all issues that could be are taken care of. 

Interviews are good for some people who may need encouragement (incentives) to answer questions while questionnaires are more suitable when the participant is unreachable and when you want to reach more participants which results in more data. Both interviews and questionnaires can use open and closed questions. Focus groups are optimal for studies where social interaction matters. They also help getting more data as the participants encourage each other to discuss. 

Observations are used during any state in development. These are good at the beginning for setting upp goals for the developers. They are also a great addition to interviews and questionnaires as these do not always provide answers for all situations. During observation it's also recommended that the participant tells you what he/she is thinking (think-aloud technique) instead of just being quiet. 

Chapter eight talks about how the gathered data should be handled. It is important not to let your own personal assumptions and bias influence the the results and also to be as objective as possible so that you conclusions are supported by what you gathered during the study. 

Analyzing quantitative data (data in form of numbers), the most common approaches are using tables and graph to identify trends. Questionnaires and closed questions are optimal methods for this type of data. Means, medians and modes are also calculated. For quantitative analysis, using patterns, themes and categorizing data are more adequate methods. 

When developing a project some requirements has to be set. These are important at the early stages to prevent large expenses if the project has to be modified later on. Task descriptions are also used through out the development, these consist of three types of descriptions, scenarios, use cases and essential use cases.  

What is the best approach to continue the project if the requirements are starting to become too difficult to accomplish?

Reading seminar #1 - Reflection

During the last exercise we chose the ferry route Slussen to Allmäna gränd.

I read the 2^nd edition of the book.

Chapter 7 discussed the iterative process of gathering data, interpreting it and understanding what the users require/need. There are several ways to gather data, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups/workshops, observation and studying documentation. For now, interviews and observation seem like the most reasonable data-gathering technique.

Chapter 12 is about observation of users, i.e watching and listening to users. When doing this it's good to have specific questions and goals in mind that the observation can answer. We have planned to do a "quick and dirty" observation of the route. Example of questions we can have in mind are "Which target group can we expect?", "Are there different groups of people at different times of the day?", "What are they doing while on the ferry?". After this, we will evaluate the information we have gathered right away, as the book suggests.

Chapter 13 described how to conduct interviews/questionnaires and how to prepare them. There are different kinds of interviews, unstructured, structured and semi-structured. Unstructured focus on more open questions and answers, whereas structured use more “closed” questions which generates more precise answers, semi-structured are somewhere in between. Analyzing unstructured interviews are more time-consuming but might give more rich answers. Unstructured interviews seems to be the best alternative to begin with, since we're not really sure how to direct the questions yet. After we have scouted the route we will create an "interview script" to make it easier for everyone in the group to ask about the same things, which in turn will make it easier to interpret the data.

Some questions for the seminar:
Which are the optimal ways of gathering data for this project? Should we for example consider questionnaires?

How can we minimize “dissonance” in the data gathering (i.e have as little influence as possible towards the ones answering the questions)?