I214: User Experience Research

Duped at Assignment 2 page.

The point of this exercise is to practice your observation and reporting skills.

• Park yourself someplace where you can observe unobtrusively for at least half an hour, longer if possible. If you can, do something related to your project.
• • You want someplace where people are going to be doing things, so that you’ll have a lot to observe (but not so much that you can’t focus), and where you can watch without raising suspicion. .  Possibilities include: cafes, stores where people browse for a while (e.g., Amoeba Music), busy bus stops, Sproul Plaza, a window table in a café from which you can watch activity on the street.
• Decide ahead of time whether there is something in particular that interests you about that situation.  But be prepared to change your ideas about what you find to be of interest once you start observing.
• For the first 15 minutes or so, simply observe without making notes. Try to see this situation anew, as if you had just arrived from another planet. The term that’s sometimes used is “make the familiar strange.”
• After this initial observation, decide what you are going to focsu on. It may be that which you had decided ahead of time, but it may be something that caught your attention in the course of the initial observation. You need to focus your attention.

• Possibilities include:
• • -Pick someone engaged in some activity and follow them (in a sense – don’t freak them out).  What are they doing? What objects are they using or interacting with?
    • E.g., someone at Amoeba Music: which sections do they go to? Do they go straight for a particular set of disks, or do they wander? Do they read the backs of the disk covers? Are they with someone? If so, how do they interact with their companions?
  • -Pick a place and watch people move through it and see what they do there; e.g., people coming and going at a busy bus stop.  What do they do while they’re there?  How do they act when a bus comes into view? How do people decide who gets on first?
• • -Pick a task or activity involving multiple people — where different people perform different parts of the activity. You would follow the activity and not the individuals
    • E.g., in a café, follow a good order from when it is placed, through the preparation, to delivery to the customer.
• Keep realtime fieldnotes. These are rough notes for yourself.  Keep distinct your facts and interpretations, in whatever way works for you. Some people divide the paper and put facts on one side, interpretations on the other. The point is to keep the facts separate from your interpretations, since your interpretations are only preliminary and may be erroneous; but not to lose any insights that arise while you are watching.
• Do a complete write-up of your real-time notes as soon as you can afterward.  Fill out what you didn’t have time to write in the field. First simply describe without interpretation.
• • THEN add your interpretations (but still keep them distinct – for example, some people use different typefaces for observations vs analysis/interpretation; or use two columns, one for observations, one for interpretations).  These would be your notes to refer back to weeks, days, months, years later, so they have to make sense.

Then write up a brief but coherent narrative for me.

• -What you did: where you went, how you set up to do your observation, and perhaps why you made those choices.
• -A general description of the scene — this should give me enough to understand what you were seeing.  Diagrams and photos can be a big help.
• -A summary of what you observed – of your factual observations.
• -Then interpretations and conclusion about what you saw. This is more than just description, but doesn’t have to be earth shattering

Keep distinct (1) what you see, and (2) your interpretation of what’s going on.

You’ll have three products:

1. Rough notes made in the field

2. Your detailed write-up of your rough notes

3. A summary for me.

Turn in:

#3, above

A couple of pages from #2

Photos are a plus, but not required.

Due:  Tuesday, September 21.

Filed by Nancy Van House at 10:44 am under Assignments
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