UXD 210

Spring 2020

Craig Miller

Weekly Notes

Assignments

Team Project 1
User Research and Personas
Due Saturday May 2 before 11:30pm

Overview

For this first phase of the team project, you will draw upon your chosen research focus and conduct contextual interviews with prospective users. Your goal is to learn about current goals and difficulties and use them to propose designs or redesigns that address them. You will report your findings and design proposals as personas and possible scenarios of use.

Contextual Inquiry

Using a selected assignment overview (from the individual assignments) as a starting point, describe a focus and develop (or rework) a set of common questions for a contextual inquiry. Then, each individual should conduct two contextual inquiries, which will produce 6, 8 or 10 sets of interview notes. When conducting your interviews, make sure you follow ethical practices regarding informed consent and the confidentiality of your users (see Saffer pp. 83-84). You may choose to interview as pairs. If you do, conduct at least 4 contextual inquiries per pair.

When interviewing, note patterns and phenomena (see Saffer pp. 84 - 85). These can be recorded as short statements on user goals, preferences and difficulties.

Personas and Scenarios

Consolidate interview notes from similar users to produce 2-4 personas. Using the book descriptions (see Saffer pp. 106 - 111) and the online examples as a guide, create personas based on the interview notes. With each persona, develop at least one scenario that describes this fictitious user working through a proposed solution.

Report Contents

Your submitted report should contain the following sections:

  • Executive summary. Develop a one to two paragraph statement that summarizes your proposed project, interview process and a couple major findings and a possible design or redesign that addresses your findings.
  • Process overview. Summarize your interview process and how you developed the personas.
  • Design approach. Summarize what you plan to design or redesign that addresses the needs of your interviewed users.
  • Personas and design scenarios. Provide a summary statement of the personas, followed by the personas, each with a scenario that applies the design approach.
  • Appendix materials. Appendix includes process details (e.g. questions, individual notes from the interviews and any other supporting documents. Also include how individuals contributed to the project.

Team Process

The following is a recommended set of team phases and deadlines:

  • Inquiry Plan (Tuesday April 21). Create a shared document that describes how the data gathering is to be conducted. This includes who qualifies as potential users, what common questions you will ask and what you will observe.
  • Conduct inquiries (Saturday April 25). Each team member conducts two contextual inquiries with at least two potential users (or a pair conducts 4 inquiries). Post notes in a shared document. Each team participant should extract out user characteristics in a persona-like form and lists of observations and possible design approaches.
  • Consolidation (Tuesday April 28). Group shared users into personas and consider design approaches. Organize into a draft version of the final report.
  • Finalize report (Saturday May 2). Write executive summary. Edit and proofread. Submit!

Submission

Submit your report to D2L as a PDF document.

Grading

This project is worth 10% of the course grade. The following criteria will be used for scoring the report:

  • Report organization and presentation. The report is well written and organized so that it is easy to find required information.
  • Report completeness. The report has all required contents. You are strongly encouraged to review all requirements on this page before you submit your report.
  • Process.The report documents the interviews and the questions. The report shows that the proper process (e.g. ethical interviewing) was followed for obtaining the report contents.
  • Supported findings. The personas are clearly derived from the notes.