Each project group, please sign up for a meeting with me.

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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.

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Audio

Free (and pretty good) audio editing software: Audacity Mac and Windows

Recording phone calls using Google Voice — the major limitations: they have to call you, doesn’t work when you call them.

Slideshows: Images and Sound

iPhoto

http://soundslides.com/ — pretty good. Windows and Mac.   Free demo.  $40 basic; $70 pro.

Video

Added 10/14/10 Free and Open-source Vertov:

As of 10/15/10 the current version of Vertov is not compatible with the current version of Zotero.

Vertov is a free media annotating plugin for Zotero, an innovative,
easy-to-use, and infinitely extendable research tool. Both are Firefox
extensions. Vertov allows you to cut video and audio files into clips,
annotate the clips, and integrate your annotations with other research
sources and notes stored in Zotero.

http://digitalhistory.concordia.ca/vertov/

iMovie

Windows Live Movie Maker

Jaycut – see Lifehacker description.  Web, free.

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Filed by Nancy Van House at 10:09 am under Students
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LiveScribe for note-taking for students with disabilities: NVH

Jason Reid – exoskeleton

Sanghar Tamaddon – green directory

Sebastián Fuenzalida  – gaming

Mason Sexton –  moonit.com

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Readings

Kuniavsky, ch. 11

There are lots of resources (online and published) on survey research generally. Here are some suggestions.  Most emphasize some aspects more than others — at least skim all of them, so that you can pick up from each what it covers more thoroughly than the others do:

Research Methods Knowledge Base: Survey Research.  You’ll see lots of similarities to interviews, but some important differences.

University of Reading Statistical Services Center, Guidelines for Planning Effective Surveys. This one has less on question construction than the above but more on other surveying issues.

Statnotes, Survey Research.  Especially good on design considerations and item bias.  Also good FAQs.

Questionnaires in Usability Engineering: FAQs (3rd ed)

Added 10/13:

The Pew Internet and American Life project is in many ways the gold standard of doing internet-related survey research — not online but via phone, where the sample is more controlled and they can reach non-users.  I don’t find a good discussion of their methods for this project, but this web page describes their methods for another project, The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

The kinds of surveys done in UX are nowhere near this elaborate, but are in some ways low-effort approximations of the more elaborate and statistically-valid surveys conducted by organizations like Pew.

Look in particular at this page on questionnaire design and this page on survey administration.

Analyzing survey results

University of Reading Statistical Services Center,  Approaches to the Analysis of Survey Data

Optional and Useful:

Free Survey Software

There are many.  Be sure you check their limits on free or trial use — not just # of questions and respondents, but what sort of data analysis they do, and/or whether you can download data to Excel.

surveymonkey.com

zoomerang.com

polldaddy.com

Questionnaires: Sources of questions and examples of questions (and data analysis)

Large-scale surveys from reputable sources can be great sources of question wording, when they ask questions you need to ask.  Presumably such a source will have done an adequate job of developing and testing questions. A survey of a population similar to yours can be a particularly source of questions on demographics.

Even when they don’t ask questions useful to you, looking at good models can help your own survey development.

Their reports may be even more helpful — showing good ways to summarize and present survey data.

Pew Internet and American Life project publishes their surveys. If they have written a question that works for you, use it!  Also, by seeing how carefully they word questions and answers you get a sense of the kinds of problems in question wording that they had to deal with (which may help you think about your questions).

A recent example of their work –  Online News Survey

UC Berkeley survey of new undergrads – unfortunately, doesn’t address technological capabilities and experience.

Smithsonian -ForeSee Survey —  You’ll see this company’s slight-customized surveys on a lot of websites.

Very simply website usability survey from Underage Drinking Enforcement Training Center – as an example

Reports

UC Berkeley survey of new undergrads The reports presented here are minimal.  They summarize findings for entire respondent pool; don’t break down by subgroups. Don’t compare years.

Pew Internet and American Life project Their reports tend to be for a popular audience, so don’t always have the detail needed, but they’re good at summarizing key findings.

Filed by Nancy Van House at 8:50 am under Methods,Surveys
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