Creating the User Experience 1

Assignment

This quick exercise is meant to help you get to know other class members while also actively engaging some of the issues that you will be dealing with when creating good user experiences. Follow the steps below.

******

Deliverables:

I

  1. Find a willing partner.
  2. You will soon introduce your partner to the rest of the class (& vice-versa) in a brief presentation. Your goal will be to try to get to know your partner as best you can without speaking to him/her, using only certain specified methods and in a very short time. As you go through the steps, feel free to jot down your observations to aid later discussion.
  3. Make a list of the kinds of things you want to learn about your partner.
  4. Construct a short (~10+ questions) questionairre to accomplish this, using only the following question formats. Include at least
    one question in each format:
      • Yes/No
      • Multiple-choice
      • Rating scale
      • Numerical Fill-In-The-Blank
  5. Swap exercise surveys with partner, complete & return.
  6. Interview your partner - you only have 20~30 minutes

Now…

Present your partner to the class &

  1. Discuss your observations on this exercise.
  2. Consider: How does what you can learn from a survey differ from what you can learn from an interview? Why?
  3. Consider: If you could observe your partner "in the wild" for 1 hour, what/when/how would you do so? Why?
  4. Consider: If you could bring your partner "to the lab" to perform some task, what would it be? How? Why?

Glossary

May I Ask You a Few Questions? By Tina Bronkhorst

Interviews

Gathering information about users by talking directly to them. An interview can typically gather more information than a questionnaire and go into a deeper level of detail. Interviews are good for getting subjective reactions, opinions, and insights into how people reason about issues. Interviews may happen in person or over the phone. Interviewers focus on finding an appropriate sample of interviewees, making the interviewee feel comfortable, and trying to avoid misleading questions or any behavior that might encourage a biased response.

"Structured interviews" are ones with a pre-defined set of questions and responses. They are sometimes better than questionnaires because thorough response is usually easier and because optional avenues of questioning can be explored which depend on answers to earlier questions. A structured approach can provide more reliable, quantifiable data than an open-ended interview, and can be designed rigorously to avoid biases in the line of questioning.

"Open-ended interviews" permit the respondent (interviewee) to provide additional information, ask broad questions without a fixed set of answers, and explore paths of questioning which may occur to the interviewer spontaneously during the interview. An open-ended approach allows for an exploratory approach to uncover unexpected information, used especially when the exact issues of interest haven't been identified yet.

Structured and open-ended approaches may be combined. For instance, an interview can begin with structured questions, and once the quantifiable data is covered, open up discussion with the interviewee into other areas.

.css file based on the work of Jeffrey Zeldman

Kelake is written by Clark MacLeod.
©2003 All rights reserved. Please link and copy but please accredit.
Any opinions expressed on this site are the personal views of Clark MacLeod only, and do not represent the views or policies of any other person or company.