Sem 1 - Reflections on Chap. 7, 8 and 10.

The three chapters 7, 8 and 10 from the book Interaction Design (2011) was quite a read that gave a deep insight and a concrete foundation for data-gathering, analysis of said data and different forms of field studies. When reading through these chapters, I felt that I recognized alot of what was written along with a sense of relief that augmented the knowledge with a good basic description. An example of what I’m trying to convey is the chapter about the different techniques of data-gathering. To have the different ways of interviewing, observing or even doing a questionnaire on paper is a valuable resource that will definitely be useful both during this HCI-course and in the future.

What interested me the most is the actual interpretation of data. The book mentioned never to conclude something that you don’t have the data to back it up with. In other words, it’s very important to ask yourself questions like “What is my goal with this?” and “Why did most participants answer the way they did?”. Do we need questionnaires or have structured interviews with users? Asking different questions may result in different outcomes and hence, having a good structure and a clear goal from the start will steer the project into the right direction.

One part that I found a bit lacking was the observational part of data-gathering. For example, if you’re developing a system for a traveler to buy tickets for a train, you won’t be able to do any observations until you actually have that system in place. In other words, you will need to do plenty of data-gathering before, during and even after the project is complete. You might also want to know if you'd need quantitative or qualitative data. The main point of this course, for me, is to learn how to develop anything with a user in mind, and said users ability to interact with a system - be it a simple touch screen or an entire smartphone. What fascinates me the most is how a small change (for example structuring a text) can make such a huge impact on usability along with hundreds of more aspects for a user.

Question: How do you make sure you collect the correct data? Do you restructure your questions for say an interview beforehand to get less, but more valuable information or do you try to get as much as possible and filter it out afterwards?

- Thomas von Prouss