Seminar One: Reading Reflection by Hui Pang

Chapter 7: Data Gathering

Data gathering is a central part of establishing requirements, and of evaluation. With requirement activity, the purpose is to collect sufficient, accurate, and relevant data so that a set of stable requirements can be produced. There are 3 main techniques for gathering data: interviews, questionnaires, and observation.

Interviews involve an interviewer asking interviewees a set of questions, and we chose semi-structured interviews so that we can guide interviewee when necessary. We use direct observation, which involves spending time with individuals observing activity as it happens.

We set our goals to be improving travelling experience of the ferry trip, and identified participants to be families with kids. We asked for their informed consent for using audio recording as means of data recording. As for triangulation, we conducted interviews under different weather and day of the week. 

Chapter 8: Data Analysis

Since most of data we gathered are qualitative, we will do a qualitative analysis to provide a more comprehensive account of the behaviour being observed. 

Qualitative analysis focuses on the nature of something and can be represented by themes, patterns, and stories. There are 3 simple types of qualitative analysis: identifying recurring patterns and themes, categorizing data, and analyzing critical incidents. We mainly used the first during our by gaining an overall impression and to start looking for patterns. 

Presenting the results is just as important as analyzing the data. 

Chapter 10: Identifying needs, Establishing requirements

A requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform.  

Personas are rich description of typical users of the product under development that the designers can focus on and design the product for. Usually a product will require more than one personas and it may be helpful to choose one primary persona who represents a large section of the intended user group. 

A scenario is an “informal narrative description”. It describes human activities or tasks in a story that allows exploration and discussion of contexts, needs, and requirements. Often scenarios are generated to help explain or discuss some aspect of the user’s goals. They can be used to imagine potential uses of a product and to capture existing behaviour. 

Questions: 

1. How can we translate results of data analysis into needs and requirements?
2. How can we know if we get it right?