Before seminar #1

The first chapter explains different data gathering techniques and how to use them in such a way that your data is suitable for further analysis and relevant to your goals. The book presents three main ways to gather your data: Interviews, questionnaires and observations. These techniques can be carried out in different ways depending on your specific goals and needs, which should always be clear before you start gathering data. Whereas closed questions like ‘Have you used this product before?’ tend to give you quantitative data, open questions like ‘Why do you dislike this product?’ will give qualitative data that is more complex and harder to analyze. I have used all three methods before, but I have never given the process leading up to the data gathering much thought. The concept of pilot studies and thorough preparatory work is something I certainly I will put more focus on in this and future projects.

The second chapter goes into great detail about how to properly interpret and analyze your gathered data, which conclusions to draw from emerging patterns in your data and how to present these findings in a clear and unbiased format. Different methods of analyzing are recommended, based on the type of data you have gathered (quantitative/qualitative) and the technique used to gather the data. This is something that I’m sure our group will look back on many times during our design project. The book also presents different theoretical frameworks (e.g. Grounded theory) that you can use to structure your data analysis, which I honestly found a little hard to understand.

The third and final chapter is about establishing requirements, i.e. how to fully understand the users in order to create and maintain a user-centered design process. This is something I hope to learn more about, as the concepts and methods of identifying these requirements are more foreign to me than the chapters on gathering and analyzing data. I am especially interested in learning how to choose data gathering techniques based on the users’ needs and goals.

Question for the seminar: I would like to talk more about the theoretical frameworks and how they are supposed to aid you in your data analysis.