User Research Overview
This summarizes contextual inquiry and analysis, presented in Hartson and Pyla chapters 3 and 4 (ch. 7 and 8, 2nd edition).
Process Overview (see figure in section 4.5)
- All contextual inquiry
- All contextual analysis
- All requirements & design-informing models extraction
- Design
Goals
User research means learning about people's goals and what can be done to help them achieve their goals. More specifically, user research methods help identify the following:
- Identifying goals, needs, preferences and motivations that will lead to requirements (i.e. what does this product need to do?)
- Context of use: when and where will people be using it?
- Descriptions of users relevant to product's design
Contextual inquiry and analysis may focus on the following:
- What people are currently doing
- What people have to do but really dislike doing
- What people would like to be doing
Methods
- Interviews and contextual inquiries
- Questionnaires
- Focus groups
- Field observation and user shadowing
- Studying documentation
Focus for HCI 440?
Collecting data
- Quotes and paraphrased answers
- Descriptions of users (titles, responsibilities, capabilities, frequent activities, critical activities
- Descriptions of task walkthroughs
Activity notes (section 4.3, 8.2 in 2nd edition)
- Single issue, concept, strategy, preference, problem
- Source(s)
- Grouping with other notes
These notes are then grouped to make affinity diagrams.
Describing users
The following characteristics are probably the most important for describing users (adapted from Usability Engineering by Jacob Nielsen, p. 44):
- Experience with previous or similar products
- General computer experience
- Knowledge of domain
Describing tasks
- Artifact analysis
- Task decomposition (with hierarchies)
- Listing pros and cons of performing each task
Combining users and tasks
- Personas and Activities
- User/activity matrices
Discussion questions
- Assume that you are interested in developing a Web site to support people in finding an apartment. What activities could you plan for learning about potential users and their problems and needs?
- What are the challenges of eliciting useful information in an interview? What methods address those challenges?
- What are some considerations for choosing the right elicitation methods?
- What is the difference between data-driven inquiry and model-driven inquiry? Examples? (see section 3.3, also see 8.4 2nd edition)