Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Febuary 4th, 2009

Today's topic: Scenarios

Review: Persona Exercise
  • Interviews...
    • Easiest parts?
    • Hardest parts?
  • Driving the persona?
    • Easy? Hard? Enough data?
  • How did you decide who to interview?
  • How did you decide what to ask?
  • What lessons learned for Capstone project?
Interviewing Tips: Finding Users
  • Decide carefully who to interview
    • Develop a profile
      • Who are the general users for your system?
      • What user characteristics are relevant to design & testing?
      • What characteristics should all users have in common?
      • What characteristics will vary? How will you define them?
  • Try to interview between 6 and 10 people
    • Less than 6 make it hard to identify patterns
    • More than 10 often not very useful
  • Having trouble finding people? Ask the first few users to suggest others.
  • Do contextual interviews
    • Go to the users’ relevant environment
      • E.g., office? Home?
Interviewing Tips: What to Ask?
  • Interview as a team (VERY helpful!!)
    • One interviewer, one scribe
  • Explain why you are talking to them & they can end interview at any time (for any reason)
  • Ask open-ended questions that allow elaboration
  • Look for opportunities to probe interesting responses
  • Be specific in getting how people already do tasks
    • Verbal: Tell me about the last time you ….
    • Observational: Walk me through how you’d …You can change/add questions as needed
  • This is the design phase! The point is to gather all relevant data!
  • Ask about contrasts: Best experience? Worst experience? Likes? Dislikes?
  • Last question:
    • “Can I contact you again if I have any more questions?”
    • Needs to be OK to say “no”!
Interviewing Tips: What Not To Do
  • Don’t use “Yes/No” questions
  • Be wary of leading questions
  • Avoid speculative questions
    • “Would you use an electronic calendar?”
    • If you must ask, do so at very end of interview
    • Don’t put too much stake in the answers
  • Avoid specific design questions
    • Look for data to inform your design! Don’t expect your interviewee to be able to solve your design problems.
Analyzing Your Interview Data
  • Flesh out notes from interview IMMEDIATELY
  • In teams, have each member start by analyzing data separately
    • Look for patterns that concern
      • Design priorities
      • Design issues
      • Deal-breakers (a.k.a. show-stoppers-such as registering; people hate to register and that is sometimes a deal breaker for a site)
    • Reconcile key themes identified by each team member
  • Use data to identify priorities
  • Then derive tasks
WHAT IS A SCENARIO?
  • Task + Persona = Scenario
  • Idealized but detailed
  • Describes a specific instance of interaction
  • Tries to balance generality & accuracy
    • Use persona
    • Use common, general tasks
    • Situate use in your design
  • Scenario-Based Development
    • Scenario-Based Evaluation
HOW TO WRITE A SCENARIO
  • Describe the situation of use that people (e.g. your persona) would experience
  • Write it for what your persona would want (or need) to do
    • Several scenarios for common tasks (to account for the most common tasks in your system)
  • Include specific, realistic details from your data collection
    • could use data from interviews to use in the scenario
  • Scenarios tell a short story (need to be able to imagine what's happening)
    • Represent the conditions, situations, and people that you'll be designing for
Scenarios for Design
  • Usually, a collection of scenarios are used
    • Should represent key priorities of your design
  • Scenarios help you perform evaluations without the users
    • Cognitive Walkthroughs
  • Scenarios help justify & communicate decisions
CHECK THE PPT TO REVIEW THE EXAMPLE SCENARIO FOR STUART (slide 18)

Scenario Practice
  • We practiced creating a scenario for Stuart using an educational technology(in groups of 3ish).

HCI Exercise #3: Scenarios
  • Due next week, Feb. 11
  • May work in teams
  • Steps:
    • Use persona you created for HCI Ex #2
    • Develop two common tasks
      • Use an educational technology of your choice
      • If possible, use your Capstone project
    • Write two scenarios of use (one for each task), describing how your persona would engage with the technology to perform the task(s).

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