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.