Upload your exercises/projects

Please upload your exercises + projects into the link on the right panel "Assignment Submission."

The link is called "Upload Your Projects Here." Use it, love it.

You will obey Hello Kitteh.

Let's review everyone's work, go over the reading and embark on our very first project, Widgets.

Everybody's clustering

Read the title like "Everybody's hustling."

This is where the magic happens. Your preparation for this moment was spent in interviews. But now where you cluster all your post-it notes, the act of pattern making happens. This is one of the core tools you will need to master.

Letting the data drive the clusters is important. As you cluster, groups of patterns will emerge. These groups can then be categorized. Hopefully you can identify observations you learned from your participants.

After learning more about your participants, there will be some emergent needs you might discover. Some are obvious, some are deduced with more scrutiny. The interesting part here is there will be the needs of the users you learned from research (Observed Needs) versus the needs you thought the users might have prior to your research (Perceived Needs).

When you think about product concepts, addressing users' observed needs is where you have an opportunity to create something novel, something unique. You still bring in your Designers' Intuition. But now they are Informed Design Intuitions.

For Thursday you will document your research by:

1. Capturing the clusters as a image/photo 
2. Label the discovered topics generated from the clusters and label them on the image 
3. Write 10 insights/discoveries/gained knowledge from your interviews. 
4. From the insights gathered, brainstorm 5 possible needs for a product your participants might find useful, usable and desirable. 
5. From your observed needs, create 3 product concepts that might address these needs.
6. Bring your working print out to class for critique.
7. Size of the document is 11x17 (tabloid). 
8. Remember, this is a designed document. It should have a title page, team names, give it a title. 

Review the example documents under Course Materials. Needs answers the purpose of your product. Everything you use, it addresses some kind of need. Others do it better, some do it worse. Your perceived needs are important but the observed needs generated from research are significant. Design teams can generate interesting ideas but will be similar to other design team's. Ideas generated through research tends to be more unique and sometime more subtle, but will become the differentiator to a user's experience.

Homer is the best

Homer was loud, obnoxious and very demanding. But from a UX designer POV, there's nothing he did wrong. I would surmise we are like him to various degrees. What goes wrong in the episode is when the engineers fail to show sympathy, effort to understand why Homer says what he says. But that's enough for now in regards to users describing their wants and designers understanding their needs.

User research for design borrows many tools from anthropology, ethnography, psychology and many other fields of expertise that involves learning about people. For this class we will focus on 3 methods.

1. Contextual interview
2. Talk/think aloud
3. Directed story telling

During any of these sessions, you should have a note pad to take notes, pens/markers etc. to write/sketch, and when appropriate a voice recorder/camera to take record/photos/video.

For the Exercise 2, you and your team will interview a minimum of 6 participants. You will use Directed Story Telling and ask, "When was the last time you took a video?"

After each interview, you should record one fact/observation on 1 post-it note and generate a pile of post-it notes per each participant you spoke with, while the interview experience is still fresh in your minds. Bring this to class with print outs of photos if you have any.

In class you will cluster the post-it notes and construct an affinity model/diagram to analyze your findings.

What to do with all these Post-It notes

From there, you can start seeing patterns, discover needs, etc. from your conversations with your participants.

I've included 3 PDF's for your reference of user research in the Google Drive folder.

As for your readings by Jef Raskin and Nicol McDonald under Widgets, they will be due Feb. 14. You have plenty of of time to procrastinate.  :)