Our personas and scenarios for Excercise 3

Our group is unfortunately having difficulties with finding times to meet up so our personas and scenarios are written but not finalized. I was looking through them this morning and saw some inconsistencies so I thought it was best that we talked about them during the excercise and post them afterwards instead.

Axel's transcriptions

This interview was held with a business guy in his late twenties at centralen on his way home from work.

Introduction
Hello, I'm currently taking a course about Human-Computer Interaction and was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions before the train arrives?

Him: (Still not quite sure if he wants to or not) "okay.."

First question

Me: What's the best and worst thing about this section? Him: - eehh.. (Didn't really seem to know if I was serious or not) I'm fairly indifferent. Me: (Trying to get some more information) - Well, do you think that just this particular section/ride is different from let say the subway or any other section.

Him: It is close

Second question

Me: If you could change anything with this particular section, anything, what would it be? Him: ... Me: Haha, It could be anything at all, anything you could possibly imagine! Him: Could've been inside. (He was referring to the station/platform) Or were you maybe referring to the train? (We can hear the train arriving) Me: No, that'll be great! I can see that the train is arriving, so we'll just head to the last question.

Third and final question

Me: So what feeling do you get when you take this particular journey? Him: Haha, well i don't know.. It'll just be nice to come home.

A summery of my interview transcription

Here is my interview transcription summary as requested by our TA. It's based on the interview but may contain slightly different wording.

What is the best and what is the worst about this route?
- Best: The trains are nice (i.e. new and comfortable).
- Worst: Lack of English speaker voice [on the train].

What would you want to add to your travel experience? It can be anything! 
-  Information about connecting routes from upcoming stations. In general, more information about future possible traveling possibilities.

What do you feel when you travel from Centralen to Karlberg?
- Quite a good feeling. I think most other people feel this as well.

Alexander and Hanna's transcribed interviews

Our task is to create a product of some sort for people going on the commuter train between Stockholm Central Station and Karlberg Station. When picking a target group we decided on the probably biggest one, people who commute between those stations every day. They are simple to access for interviews because there are more of them on specific times of the day, congestion time, so we set of to do our interviews at 5 pm when people were going home from work.

The interviews took place at Stockholm's Central Station. One person acted as interviewer and the other took notes of the answers. The questions that were asked, were all asked in the same way. The questions can be found in the first part of the transcript below. The answers are transcribed without the questions but categorized according to the question's number.

Questions:

What is the best and what is the worst about this route? 

• Follow up: why? do you think others agree with you? How could the worst thing about the route be turned into the best? 

What would you want to add to your travel experience? It can be anything!

• Follow up: elaborate, what would you use this for? Do you think others want this as well? 

What do you feel when you travel from Centralen to Karlberg? 

• Follow up: is it always this feeling or is that just today?

Interviews:

Older lady

1. 

+ There is no good part

- There are a lot of people

             Yes, they should have more trains

2.

More seats on the train

3.

Can't come up with anything

Educated, middle aged man

1.

+ You get to see the view over the water and the tall buildings

- The travel time is actually double what it says on the time table, because there is always a line for the trains to wait.

               Yes I think people would agree with me

               They could solve the problem by keeping to the time table

2.

There is nothing I think should be added.

3.

I have no idea about when I'll arrive

               I always feel like that

Student, woman

1.

+ I don't know

- All the people congesting the trains.

               Probably others agree about this as well.

2.

More outlets to charge your phone after a long day in school and the battery is dead.

3.

Happy.

                I'm listening to my music and I often feel happy.

Middle aged woman

1.

+ That's really hard to say...

- The trains could go more often

                 Probably others agree about this.

2.

I'm going to Uppsala so I'd like to answer about something that is actually more relevant for my whole journey.

((Us: That's fine))

It would be great with tables that you can fold out from your seat and over your knees for longer travels. So you can have papers from work on them.

3.

I have some stress with me from the central station but when I get on the train I get calmer little by little.

Older lady #2

1.

+ I like that there is a tunnel so people cannot talk on the phone.

- There is often a line for the trains to wait to get to go, especially in the other direction coming into the central.

2.

More tracks on this part of the route, so there are no train jams.

3.

This part of the route doesn't make me feel anything special since it only adds another two minutes to my trip.

Young adult man

1.

+ You often get a place to sit when you go in the other direction since people often get of at Karlberg.

- It's annoying to have to stand up though.

2.

More places to sit.

                      Others would probably come up with better ideas but I think they would appreciate mine as well.

3.

No feelings, I'm completely neutral.

                       Yeah, I usually always feel like that.

My interview transcript

This interview was conducted with a man in his 30’s, on his way home from work. He agreed to let the interview be recorded and transcripted and the total interview length totaled to 3 minutes.

Question 1

Me: What is the worst and the best about this first section?

Man: What do you mean about this first section?

Me: Well, to Karlbergs station, anything you think is specific here?

Man: The first best? The best and the worst… good question.. I can tell you the worst immediately. It’s the bad connectivity, bad reception on the first stretch. You’re very mobile and it’s an annoying factor that you recognise if you’re commuting every day. The best thing would probably be that it’s a good feeling. You’re on your way homewards and it’s fast.

Question 2

Me: If you were able to add anything to this first distance to improve your experience, what would it be?

Man: Well then it would be that the network was functioning, I don’t need that many other experiences.

Me: So everything that you need is that in your phone?

Man: Yes, Exactly. However, something that I would like to have when I come here it to be able to instantly see connecting trains. i.e. when I come to the central station and for example are going to västra haninge I want to be able to see if it’s coming right away or in ten minutes.

Me: aha, you mean as they have it on the inner city buses?

Man: Yes exactly, one of those should be on the commuter train as well. It would be nice to see connections. Would also be nice to receive a visualization, if I jump off at Karlberg and are going with the bus it would be nice to see where the bus is.

Me: Ah, to see where the bus stop is you mean?

Man: Not really, to be able to visualize where the bus is located, if it’s just 100 meters away down the street and if I have to run. That kind of visual feedback would have been of great aid.

Question 3

Me: What feeling to you have when sitting on the train here?

Man: Well it can be tied back to what you said before, you are a bit tired, I want to relax, without that many impressions.

Me: So the trip should be easy to relax on?

Man: Precisely!

Me: Your train is coming now, have a nice commute!

Man: Thanks, the same to you!

/Sofie

My interview transcript

Because I forgot to ask my interview subject for permission to publish the transcript, I cannot do so. Therefore I've emailed the transcript to my group members.

Overall the interview was successful, and we gained some interesting insights from a non-local traveler.

/Yrin

Seminar 1 - Inidividual notes, Hanna

Chapter 7. Data Gathering

3 ways: Interviews, questionnaires, observation

Key Issues: Goals, participants, triangulation, pilot study

Collection methods: notes, audio recording, photograph, video

What I think is the biggest issue is to find a representative amount of people to participate, and enough of them (without fallout). Especially after the pilot study (the people participating there cannot participate in the final study).

Chapter 8. Data analysis, interpretation and presentation

Quantitative analysis problem: might seem like the most scientific approach, but even numbers can be presented in a biased way (like when picking what numbers to present).

Qualitative analysis problem: How to sort and sift through all the data and make sense of it. One solution is to look for critical incidents. But what meaning do they have if they are only “outliers” (not occuring often)?

What are your thoughts on theoretical frameworks? page 303. I feel like the grounded theory-approach sounds pretty natural in a way…

Chapter 10. Establishing requirements

It’s important to find the problems (requirements) early in the development process since that makes it cheaper to fix them.

Functional and non-functional requirements… I didn’t understand the difference? nvm

What is the difference between general data gathering (chapter 7) and data gathering for requirements? Is it about “knowing” what you are looking for? Is the general one more like the grounded theory, you’ll see what you can do with what you find.

Excercise 1: First group meeting and preparing field studies!

This was the first time all 6 of us had the chance to meet!

During the exercise, we discussed how we wanted to do our field study and what transportation route we wanted to focus on. We chose option 2, Centralen-Karlberg with the commuter train. We decided to do our first round of field studies this week with very open, unstructured interviews to give us a view of the context and what kind of problems may appear at this route. After analysing this data we want to go back and do more structured interviews, if we have time.  

Triangulation

The goal here is to get a good feel of the context. We use triangulation of data (we interview different people) and investigator triangulation - we will all do interviews, and we all give our own touch on the interviews, which affects the data. We also use methodological triangulation for the data gathering to reach this goal, since we are doing state of the art research as well.

The interviews

Axel, Sofie and Yrin will meet on Monday, and Alexander and Hanna will meet on Tuesday to do interviews at the stations and on the trains. Unfortunately I (Elisabet) will be travelling myself so I can't participate, but I will be back to participate in the structured interviews.

Data recording

We will try to do sound recordings if the interviewees agree to, otherwise we will take notes. Note taking is very flexible and non-obtrusive, but it can be hard to record everything, especially if you aren’t used to taking notes during an interview. If the notes aren’t good, the reliability of the data isn’t very good. Audio recordings are also flexible and non-obtrusive, especially if we use our phones to record. If the interview is longer, the sound quality is important, but since our interviews are short it isn’t as important for us. The shortness of the interviews is also key, since the transcription won’t take very long.

We will do the interviews in pairs/groups of three so one person leads the interview and the other/s record and take notes.

After the interview sessions, we will do a quick analysis of the interviews and what kind of information we gathered, and then we will meet up for breakfast before the exercise on Thursday to finish the analysis.

 

Interview

First we thought that we would make a semistructured interview, which combines questions that have limited amounts of answers with questions that are open ended. But when we wrote the questions we realized that due to how early in the stages of the project we are we want very open answers to inspire and guide us in some direction. Also, because we aren’t going to have time to do a lot of interviews, there is little point to aim for quantitative data, which you would get with a structured interview. Instead, we are aiming for qualitative data, which is obtained by open ended questions. We wrote questions with some optional follow up questions, and decided that sometimes we would ask “Why?” if the interviewee seemed to have a lot to say about a specific question. We also made sure that the questions were in an order where there are positive ones in the beginning and more negative and/or specific questions come later, to make the interviewee start out feeling safe to answer more complex questions later on.

For a number of reasons it was better to do interviews rather than questionnaires. A questionnaire would take longer time to do with open ended questions. It would perhaps not be answered by many people, meanwhile most people asked to be interviewed would probably say yes, increasing the degree of participation. 

The interview structure we decided upon is as follows:

Introduction

Hi, we are from KTH and we're doing a field study to get ideas on ways to improve the travel experience in this area, we would like to ask a few short questions. Is it okay if we record this conversation? (if not, tell them that is perfectly fine and we will just take notes)

 

Questions

• What is the best and what is the worst about this route?
• Follow up: why? do you think others agree with you? How could the worst thing about the route be turned into the best?
• What would you want to add to your travel experience? It can be anything!
• Follow up: elaborate, what would you use this for? Do you think others want this as well?
• What do you feel when you travel from Centralen to Karlberg?
• Follow up: is it always this feeling or is that just today?

We are going to do the interviews on the platform and during the congestion time to reach the interviewees we are interested in and in an environment that is relevant. Making a short interview on the platform is very convenient since everyone is waiting on their train for a few minutes and would probably have time to do the interview.

Group photo

Group B4

We'll try to find a more inspiring background - and and make sure everyone's had their morning coffee - when doing the next take. /Yrin
:-)

Alexander Koski - Individual Notes for Seminar 1

Notes for Seminar 1.

Following every highlited word is a pagenumber of where you will find the keyword in the coursebook Interaction Design by Sharp, Rogers and Preece. 2nd Edition.

The two chapters we are about to read for this seminar goes hand in hand according to me. One cannot live without the other. If you gather your data poorly you cannot draw any conclusions from your analysis. The same scenario occurs if the opposite is true also. If you have done a splendid job gathering data but does not analyze it well the results will again not be reliable. 

Because our task of conducting interviews for our project, I find it important that we know the principles and purposes with gathering data through interviews. It is also important know the limitations of an interview. It is harder to get the interviewee to reflect deeper on her answers than it would be if we instead conducted a questionnaire. Therefore to get a good view of the reality we should if we had the time for a triangulation and gather data from other kind of methods too.

How come Grounded theory is such a well-established analyzing method? The Grounded theory finds a theory to explain and predict a set of data. I feel that this behavior, to come up with theories, is the sole purpose of gathering data in the first place and therefore does not need a theory to explain the only thing you can do with that data.

Chapter 7 - Data gathering.

• Data recording
Sid 294. There are lots of different methods for gathering data. You can record data with a film camera, audio recorder, taking photographs or even using pen and paper to take notes and draw pictures.

• Interviews
Sid 298. In interview is a conversation with a purpose. The interview we are going to conduct in this course is an open ended.

• Questionnaires
Sid 308-309. A survey fore people to answer with pen and paper.

• Observation
Sid 321. Apart from making an interview, an observation is another way of gathering data but without having to interfere with the subject of the study. It can sometimes be difficult for people to explain what and why they are doing something, in those cases it is just easier to let the subject do its thing while you observe.

• Triangulation
Sid 293. Triangulations the use of multiple data gathering techniques on the same amount of data to get better and more accurate results.

• Rating scales
Sid 313-314. The use of the right kind of rating scale is vital for getting the right information from your participants. For example, it is important to keep in mind that providing a scale with four steps, you will force a user to take sides on a problem.

• Ethnographic data
Sid 323. Ethnographic data is data connected to a specific group och people.

• Think-aloud technique
Sid 335-336. This is an observation of how a user uses a system meanwhile the user is instructed to speak out loud what he is thinking when using the system. This gives the observer a way so understand what the user is thinking when using the system.

• Indirect observation
Sid 338-339. An indirect observation is an observation taking place with the observer not present when the user uses the system. This can be done with the user getting a video camera and being asked to film his reactions while using the system. A diary is also a method for indirect observations.

• Controlled environment
Your observation may take place in a controlled environment such as a lab aside from observing the subject in his daily day to day life.

Chapter 8 - Data Analysis

• Quantitative analysis
Sid 373. Qualitative data is data that can can easily be translated into numbers and is most usable in a bulk with other quantitative data.

• Recurring patterns
Sid 373-374. When getting familiar with the data you’ve collected, you will hopefully start to see different patterns. These pattern are a good way to start your analysis

• Categorization data
Sid 378. Data is categorized to make it easier­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ to analyze the data. It is important that this is done right so that the categorization and the results of the analysis can be reproduced.

• Qualitative analysis
Sid 359. This is done by looking at patterns in the collected data

• Presenting findings
Sid 405. The finding is to be presented in different ways for different audiences. Storytelling, and summarizing the findings are two methods of doing it.

• Grounded theory
Sid 389. A way to analyze qualitative data. This method makes you come up with a theory that explains why the data is the way it is. And this new Grounded theory can be used to explain and predict different scenarios.

• Empirical data
Sid 389, 393. Empirical data is data from which you can derive a ground theory from.

Chapter 10

• Task description
Sid 504-506. Alot of software has the sole purpose of solving a problem the user is experiencing. To be able to design a program that solves the users problems in the right way you will need a task description of what your program will have to do and in what scenarios the user will be needing your software.

• Task analysis
Sid. 514. A task analysis separates itself from a task description in the way that the task analysis analyses a user’s behavior on an existing system.

• Non-functional requirements
Sid 477. “The product must be delivered within six months” or “The program must run om both a Mac and a PC”

• Context of use
Sid 530. Context of use is a kind of requirement that has to do with the environment the system is placed in.

• Cultural probes
Sid 489-491.These are used to find inspiration rather than find specific user needs. The user is sent a special care package including a camera, postcard etc. The user then gets a task, for example, take some pictures of your home, the first person you meet today and the clothes you are waring and write a story about it. From this you might get inspiration for new areas to improve.

• Use cases
Sid 511. Use cases studies a specific scenario between a user and a system. For example if the user often goes to the library to find books, a use case could be to closely study the steps a system takes the user trough to reach 

Reading Seminar 1 - Individual notes, Sofie

Chapter 7 Data Gathering

This chapter describes how to collect data, from the planning phase till how you perform the interviews or observations. I think that one of the most important things in the planning phase is to set goals, what do we want to achieve with the data gathering. When we know what we want to achieve, then it’s easier to know how to do it.

We wanted to gather as much data as possible, because we didn’t know what type of product we wanted to develop. Therefor we did interviews on the station included in our route, and we wanted to have prepared questions to start with, and then ask questions on the answers we got. There are different ways to record the information like taking notes, audio or video, we chosed to use audio recording and transcribe the interviews afterwards, which is needed according to the literature for detailed analysis. In the literature they describe criterions for the different techniques of recording, and according to them our technique is inexpensive, flexible and relatively unobtrusive. The reliability of the data is high, but we have to take in consideration that the background noise on the platform could muffle what is said.

Their are different types of interviews, it could be unstructured, structured, semi-structured or interviews in a focus-group. And I think we could say that we planned to do some kind of semi-structured/unstructured interview because we said that we should be prepared to continue on new topics, and we wanted to generate rich data. In a semi-structured interview the interviewer starts with pre planned questions and then probes the interviewee to say more until no more relevant information is forthcoming.

After reading the literature again I would say that it is really important to have well planned questions, and that they should be short, neutral and simple. Then you also have to choose if you want to have them open or closed, I would say that open questions gives you more qualitative data, and closed questions is good if you want to have quantitative data and are planning to do many interviews.

In this chapter they also describe other ways of gathering data, for example with questionnaires or observations. We are going to use observations later in controlled environments, think-alouds and also direct field studies, like state-of-the-art.

The chapters ends with the tip that it is good to combining different techniques, and that it results in a more reliable dataset, and that is something to keep in mind for upcoming projects when we don’t do it part-time in a course project.

Chapter 8 Data Analysis

When you start analysing your data there are some initial processing steps for each of the methods. For interviews or raw data is the Audio recordings, and these can give us both qualitative and quantitative data. Examples that they give for qualitative data is responses to open questions and the respondent’s opinions. Examples given for quantitative data is Age, job Role and so on, and also responses to closed questions. The processing steps are transcriptions of recordings and expansions of notes.

Quantitative data is easy to present, and therefor I think it is easier to convince stakeholders that the new product we want to develop is needed, when we can show it with graphs and diagrams. It requires more job with qualitative data as I understood it. You first need to identify recurring patterns or themes, then categorizing the data and find the critical incidents. When you are analysing the qualitative data it is also important with the goals of the study, to know that you are finding what you need for your research.

Chapter 10 Identifying needs and establishing requirements  

In the beginning of this chapter they are describing why it is so important to actually identify the needs of a customer or user. The kernel of the problem is lack of communication, and that we don’t speak “the same language” I think. The customer explain something, that is understood in a totally different way, and in every step in the producing chain something changes, and the customer then receives something that they did not order, they paid for something else, but actually what they needed no one thought about. That is why communication and observations is so important when it comes to developing applications.

They are discussing requirements, functional and nonfunctional and this I recognize from software development, where we always talk about these two different types of requirements, and according to me we have to start looking at the functional ones in the beginning of the developing, and after some iterations we start with the nonfunctional ones to suit our target users.

After that we already gathered data, which we use to identify needs we start brainstorming for innovations. They recommend to have participants from a wide range of disciplines, so it is good that we have group participants from three different fields of studies. They also give tips about how to perform brainstorming, that it’s good helpful to use warm-up exercises like using word games or continuing each other's sentences. And some obvious things that the book tells us to have in consideration is that we need to keep record of the brainstorming, not banning “silly stuffs” and try to sharpen the groups’ focus.

To identify needs and establish requirements we can use Scenarios, which is described as an informal narrative description. And it describes a person's activities or tasks, and this allows exploration and discussion of needs and requirements. It also describes the context of use.

They also point out that storytelling is a natural behaviour and it is easy to convince stakeholders that something is really needed by telling them a scenario.

Use cases is also mentioned, and I think it is mostly used in software development, it describes the interaction between user and system, and you can show it with a use case diagram. It is helpful to figure out how the system should respond to different inputs from the user, so that the user can reach his goal with using the system, for example taking out cash from the ATM could be a goal, and depending on that the user types in our does with the ATM, there will be different outcomes.

The last interesting thing in this chapter is the hierarchical task analysis, and I think that we could use it if we want to design an application that for example sells tickets. Then we need to break down the tasks in smaller tasks in order to buy and use the ticket. This is easy to represent graphical, and it reminds me of Work-Breakdown structures in project management, where you want to finish a task, but for that you have to finish smaller sub-task to complete the initial task.

Seminar 1 - individual preparation notes

From the reading we did before Seminar 1 I gathered that setting clear and precise goals is very important for a data gathering endeavour, since they affect the analysis you can do later on. It is also important to identify participants and do pilot studies, to (for example) eliminate unclear questions etc. It has also been made clear that the data gathering techniques you use affect and influence the participants.

The breakdown of interviews into structured (short, closed questions with a known range of answers), unstructured (exploratory conversations around a topic, open questions that generate rich data) and semi structured (a mix between the structured and semi structured) was interesting! I think it is easy to be scared of doing more unstructured interviews or to deal with qualitative data in general, because it is harder than to figure out percentages! I think, however, that if you put in the work it can yield lots of good information about what you’ve studied. I hope we can do that with the project so we can practice categorizing data among other things! I am very intrigued by the grounded theory way of iterating data gathering and analysis until you don’t get any more ideas from the data.

I think the most important thing about the chapter on establishing requirements is that you need to do it properly in order to avoid having to fix problems with your product later. I’m wondering if we can do some task analysis in the project, I thought that seemed very interesting and useful! Task analysis is used for investigating cognitive processes and physical actions in an existing situation, to see what practices are in use. This can help with establishing requirements since you get an analysis of what people are doing, why they are doing it and how, in a particular situation.

Question for the seminar:
How can we eliminate the effect that our data gathering technique has on the participants of our study?

Seminar 1 - notes from group discussion

Some notes from when we talked about the required reading:

Chapter 7 - Data gathering

• "User friendly questions" - pilot studies are important
• Important to have clear goals with the study
• Interviews, questionnaires, observation. Short questions! 
• Interviews: structured, unstructured, semistructured
• Time and resources affect what you can do with your study
• How can you reach people to interview? 
• Use several processes/techniques to gather data. 

Chapter 8 - Analyzing data 

• Quantitive and qualitative. Use both! With fewer participants, more useful to do a qualitative analysis.
• Grounded theory, iterative process. You can begin with more open qs, and analyze to come back to more structured questions.
• Affinity diagrams
• Categorize data, categories depend on the goal and shouldn't overlap. Should be able to replicate analysis - to researchers who analyze with the same scheme should get similar results. 

Chapter 10 - Establishing requirements

• Different types of requirements - functional and non-functional. What is the difference? 
• Aside from the data gathering methods from chapter 7: studying documentaiton, researching similar products can be useful for establishing requirements. 

General thoughts: 
Better to have an open view of what to do, rather than a clear idea. We talked about going out to the travel areas and observe to get a feel of what kind of problems could be at the area and what kind of people experience those problems. We also talked about doing more unstructured interviews in the first stage of data gathering, in order to not eliminate problem areas that we hadn't thought about in beforehand. After that we can go out and do more structured inquiries about what to do for our project.