Seminar 1 - Mengdi

Chapter 7 Data Gathering

There are 3 mian techiques of gathering data: interviews, questionaires and observations. We need to use them fexibly in order to avoid biases which are inherent in any one approach.
For interviews there are unstructured(conducted when you want to explore the range of opinions, have a plan of main topics to be covered), semi-structured(have a basic script of guidance), structured(like questionaire) and group interviews(diverse and sensitive issues to be raised).
Observation can be conducted by participant observers or passive observers, but there are not pure participant or passive observers because an observer requires a certain level of detachment and cannot avoid interaction with the activities around. There are direct obsevations and indirect observations(through dairies, interaction logs and web analytics). 
There are 5 key issues: goal setting, identifying participants, the relationship between data collector and data provider, triangulation and pilot studies. All the other four key issues serve for the goal. Therefore, we need to formulate the goal well.
Triangulation is investigation of a phenomenon from (at least) two different perspectives, which includes triangulation of data, triangulation of investigators, triangulation of theories, methodological triangulation.

Chapter 8 Data Analyze

Quantitative analysis uses numerical methods to ascertain the magnitude, amout. Percentage, mean, median, mode is widely used in quantitative measures, but percentage should be used with caution if the sample data is few. A graphical representation of datagives a better overall view of the data, including any patterns it contains.
Qualitative analysis focuses on the nature of something and can be represented by themes, patterns, and stories. A important step of qualitative analysis is identifying recurring patterns or themes. Another is categorizing data. When choosing categories, it could be challenging to determine meaningful categories that are orthogonal. 

Chapter 10 Establishing Requirements

The last chaper talks about establishing requirements. Requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform. We need to extract some requirements (functional, data, environmental, user characteristics, usability goals and user experience goals) from our analysis and interpretation of data. Developing requirements is an iterative process of evolution and negotiation.