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Software Engineering and Design > HCI 3) User Research > Flashcards

HCI 3) User Research Flashcards

1
Q

User research -
Aims

A
  • Obtain concrete, empirical knowledge about users
  • Understand users first and design later
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2
Q

User research -
Challenges

A
  • Say/do problem
  • Hard to verbally express some information
  • Latent information even users are not aware of
  • Social reasons
  • Needs may only be recognised in the future
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3
Q

Goals of user research -
People

A

Insights relating to people include users’ skills, personalities, status, abilities, beliefs, habits, motivations, needs, and wants.

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4
Q

Goals of user research -
Activities

A

The tasks that users do and the practices they engage in.

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5
Q

Goals of user research -
Contexts of use

A
  • Physical: natural or built environment
  • Social: relationships
  • Organizational: power structures, division of labor
  • Historical: prior exposure to practices or systems
  • Cultural: beliefs and norms that affect use of the system
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6
Q

User research -
Who is the user?

A

Profiling to determine user groups / target audience -> sample representatives -> consider stakeholders or others indirectly involved.

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7
Q

User research methods -
Open-ended interview

A

Ask users questions about their attitudes, experiences and activities.

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8
Q

User research methods -
Contextual inquiry

A

Observe and speak to users as they do they work.

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9
Q

User research methods -
Observation

A

Observe users while trying to avoid affecting them.

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10
Q

User research methods -
Ethnography

A

Explore the viewpoint of the user through observations, interviews and participation.

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11
Q

User research methods -
Surveys

A

Collect a large sample of structured self-report data.

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12
Q

User research methods -
Diaries

A

Have users keep a diary about their use of interactive systems.

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13
Q

User research methods -
Log file analysis

A

Automatically track what users do with interactive systems.

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14
Q

User research methods -
Archival data

A

Analyse the documents and posts users produce using the interactive system.

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15
Q

Research strategy

A

Research strategy concerns how to select one or more research methods for gathering insights about users.

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16
Q

Research strategy principles

A
  1. Bounded: research methods bound what we can empirically learn
  2. Trading off conflicting criteria - realism, precision, generalizability
  3. Triangulation - combining methods to study the same phenomenon
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17
Q

User research -
Methodological quality

A
  • Validity
  • Reliability
  • Transparency
  • Ethics
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18
Q

Interview structures

A
  • Structured: quantitative or qualitative
  • Unstructured: no fixed schedule or sequence of questions
  • Semi-structured (open-ended)
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19
Q

Open-ended interviews principles

A
  • Interview is flexible in content and structure
  • Has a certain continuity
  • About understanding what the other person says
  • Needs full attention of participants
  • Needs respect and confidence
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20
Q

Micro-phenomenological interviews

A

Understanding the lived experience of users. Focuses on the evocative experience without giving content.

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21
Q

Principles of contextual inquiry

A
  • Context: being close to the activity and interviewee
  • Partnership: collaboration to understand events
  • Interpretation: attempt to create meaning of activity
  • Focus: should aim for depth
22
Q

Approach to interviews

A
  1. Transcription
  2. Analysis
  3. Verification
  4. Reporting
23
Q

User research -
What to focus on?

A
  • Space: layout of observation site
  • Actors: characteristics of people at site
  • Activities: actions of actors
  • Objects: physical elements of site
  • Events: important things that happen
  • Time: sequence of events
  • Goals: what actors attempt to accomplish
  • Feelings: actors’ emotions and moods
24
Q

Principles for analyzing field notes

A
  • Immediate recall
  • Thick description for important events
  • Coding data
  • Validation with participants
  • Realism
25
Cronbach's alpha
Measure of reliability of survey data, by measuring internal consistency of responses. 0 - 1 (max reliability)
26
Representation of people - Persona
A persona is the description of an idealized, non-existing, person that represents a type of user, often based on user research.
27
Persona - Advantages
- Creating specific individuals to keep design in check - Help avoid self-centeredness - Prioritize data and important user segments - Synthesize complex raw data - Can drive empathy by relating to another viewpoint
28
Persona - Drawbacks
- May be seen as not believable - Connection to the original data might be broken
29
Representation of activities
- Scenarios: narrative account of activity/task - Customer journeys: accounts of product/service encounter
30
Task Analysis
Method for decomposing tasks and presenting them as hierarchically organized sequence of subtasks.
31
Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA)
Established task analysis method that assumes two kinds of relationships between subtasks: 1. Order 2. Part-whole relationship
32
Rich picture
A rich picture is a way of representing the insights from user research in a diagram. It focuses on relations among people and technologies.
33
Goals of user research - Technologies
Existing interactive systems and tools that users engage with
34
Methodological quality - Validity
Whether the conclusions drawn from a study are warranted/accurate.
35
Methodological quality - Reliability
Concerns that user research results are consistent and reproducible.
36
Methodological quality - Transparency
Idea that researchers should make design, data, analysis, and derivation of conclusions accessible and inspectable.
37
Methodological quality - Ethics
Carry out user research requires that the person doing the research carefully considers what is right and wrong in collecting, analyzing, and reporting data.
38
User research - Drawbacks
- Incoherent systems striving to fulfil a plethora of bewildering user requests - Feature creep due to adhering to even the weakest signal in user research - Users adapt to systems that offer value, even if systems are not adapted well to human abilities.
39
Observations - Considerations
- Site of observation: where to observe users - Shadowing: follow particular people - Data capture and note-taking: records of observation for later analysis and verification
40
Survey research
A researcher designs a questionnaire and distributes it to respondents who fill it in. Surveys used to understand users' behaviors, experiences, needs and attitudes.
41
Design of survey research
- Research focus: identifying the goals of research - Survey types: descriptive or analytic - Sampling: how people are approached to respond to a survey
42
Unobtrusive research
Form of non-interventional user research that uses traces of users' behaviour or archival records to make inferences about users and their activites.
43
Four sources of nonreactive data
- Traces obtained by logfile analysis - Direct traces are recordings caused by users' actions - Indirect traces caused indirectly via some intermediary - Archive data
44
User research - Verifiability
How well the claim can be cross-checked with observations that are independent of the original dataset.
45
User research - Traceability
Documentation of the reasonings that led from original data to the final claim
46
Context models
Describe flows, sequences, artefacts, as well as cultural and physical circumstances related to those actors. An actor is anything that participates in some active sense in an activity.
47
Context models - Flow model
Enumeration of the main actors in context and their relationships
48
Context models - Sequence model
Ordered list of actions needed to complete a task
49
Context models - Artefact model
Description of interactions among artefacts in a workflow
50
Context models - Cultural
Expression of different beliefs, values, and practices that the involved actors may have
51
Context models - Physical
A model of the physical space and the actors’ movement in the space

Software Engineering and Design (11 decks)

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