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?
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