Thursday, September 18, 2014

Reading Seminar 1 - Alexis Tubulekas

In chapters 2, 4 and 5 in the book Designing for Interaction we study the following; the different approaches there are to do an interaction design, how to perform design research and last but not least, how to manage and structure data from a survey.

The different approaches focus on different things. For example, the User-Centered Design (UCD) has the user in mind and assumes that they know best. While Activity-Centered Design focuses on the behavior at different tasks. Which you choose depends entirely on the situation but the best thing is to move between these approaches. I think this choice is often made unconsciously. Since we in our group don’t know what our product will do, we cannot yet decide which approach we will apply.

When we’re doing design research, we leave our theories and thoughts to explore the real world. It's important to be accurate and effective since researching can prevent many future problems. Often designers work in a field where they lack expertise. Then it's even more important to do research to understand users' needs. Since our group is not accustomed museum visitors, we could for example talk to the staff at the museum to learn about visitors that visit their particular museum. Our investigation will largely be based on questioning of the visitors. Therefore it is important to prepare the questions before, to be as efficient as possible and then apply it to pre-formulate the right questions.

After the design research will have gathered a lot of data that might seem very unstructured and overwhelming. It is important to make this into structured data. The gathered information will be presented in different mediums. To analyze and evaluate we need to present everything physically and visually to easily grasp our research. One example in the book is to write everything on post-it notes, which sounds like a lot of fun. I hope we choose this method!

Persona is a conceptual model to easily spot trends in behavior, motivation and expectations in individuals. You create fictional characters that represents a portion of the target audience. I think personas is a good trick to really make sure to meet the needs of the users of the product. I hope and believe that we will use this method. As of now it seems that our target group will be ”people who never or very rarely visits a museum”.
//Alexis


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