Lecture outline
An introduction to approaches for interviewing users and the resulting consideration of research ethics. Lecture slides will be made available on the day of the lecture (June 5).
Please come and sign-up for a timeslot for critique. I will briefly cover alternative activities you can partake in during critique time at 9:45, after which we will reconvene for lecture at 11:30.
Please make sure to have materials ready for critique when your timeslot comes up.
Exploring final project ideas:
Complete a reading reflection:
Is this a problem? and how would you "define" it?
Is this a problem? and how would you "define" it?
Is this a problem? and how would you "define" it?
Talking to Humans
In-class on June 19 we will be holding 'ideas week' — an open-forum for final project options. Over the next couple weeks we will explore and add options to your ideas.
The activity today had you exploring domains and problems. Please use (or borrow) one of those ideas for today's explorations.
Please head to ah.link/bsp, and:
You have 18 minutes
We are looking to understand the context. For this course exploratory research is helpful in discovering context of use and user experience. Both of these help us define problems that may require solving or evaluative research.
Exploratory research questions should explore relationships, interactions, effects. For example:
Consider a couple of things when evaluating our research sources:
Good research tends to involve both primary and secondary sources.
Primary sources help illustrate individual experiences or perceptions. These may include:
Secondary sources help describe, summarize, or evaluate knowledge. These may include:
Please do some internet sleuthing to explore your scenario:
You have 10 minutes
Don't forget:
Primary sources
This week we want to fill in more of our gaps in experience to ensure we understand the humans in the context of this problem.
We can use interviews to understand individuals, their experiences and behaviours in context. Be careful to keep in mind:
(Before you wreck yourself)
As an interviewer you want to avoid bringing your own biases and opinions, as this can influence how the interviewee responds.
Before starting any research, consider what assumptions do you have about the brief, your sources and related topics?
When interviewing, there are a couple of approaches we can take:
For gathering someone's experience we recommend a semi-structured approach to interviewing. This means you will plan materials but allow for flexibility in having the interviewee guide the questions.
As part of our semi-structured approach, you will need a script. Included in this script should be:
It is important that your interviewee understand the why and what you are doing. This ensures that they can safely agree to participate in what you are doing.
Before you ask interview questions, you must make sure they understand:
Given that cloud services often cannot guarantee the physical location of your data will stay in Canada, I would recommend working with SFU-based tools such as Canvas Groups or SFU Vault to store research data.
When exploring someone's experience, we likely want to ask open-ended questions as much as possible. For example:
Open-ended: "Please describe how you approach planning your daily schedule."
Close-ended: "What three things are most important to you when planning your dailiy schedule?"
An approach to building questions is to consider what do you want to find out about. From there we can check our biases and try to build out a question that could give us the information we are looking for.
Revenge of the confusing
Please make a list of things you:
You have 5 minutes
Part 2
Another approach we can take to building questions is taking our assumptions and turning them into questions.
Please make a list of things you:
You have 5 minutes
Part 3
Review your questions:
Sometimes words are not enough to effectively get the response you want.
Keep in mind that prototypes, props, materials, and the ability to generate a response with more than words can be useful.
There will be more than one of you on a team. As a result, it is important that everyone has a clear role during the interview:
Just like with the interview questions, it is important that notes you take check your biases. You should aim to capture unbiased explanations of the interviewee as much as possible.
Internal distortion happens in interviews when there are problems with:
These are things that you can control.
External distortion happens in interviews when there are problems with:
These are things that you do not control as strongly.
Let's practice some 'live' setup of the space
How to work with and make sense of research results we will talk about in the coming weeks.
