Problems

Problems

1. Tangled webs of causality

   • Find opportunities to adjust, nudge and tweak. Change a few parts of the broken system

2. Important to know

   • who you are trying to help and why
   • what kind of help do they need

3. Essence of understanding

   • communicating with stakeholders
   • Delete the notion of "average user"

4. How

   • Surveys
     • structured, asynchronous, impersonal. Large scale insight but shallow. overly structured, biased on who responds
   • Observations
     • connecting with their lifestyle, revealing the complexity of their world, highly time consuming
   • Secondary Research
     • Insights that others have gained. Research papers, books etc.
   • Interviews
     • synchronous, personal, semi-structured. deeper insights, time takng and smaller range of people
     • needs interviewees to remember things, fabricated memories, misrepresentations, lies, participant response bias
   • Contextual Inquiry
     • direct observation of some aspect of their life. Get them to teach you about their problems. time consuming. Hard to generalize
     • Do's and Don'ts. Every situation needs careful account of context. knowing the options. choosing the right methods

5. Data and Insights

   • Interpretation and Synthesis
     • Patterns in the way problems are described. What's causing the problem
     • Consequences of the problem. Aspects that are changeable
     • GOALS and VALUES
       • Different designs serve different goals. Important to understand the space of goals you might design for.
     • PERSONAS
       • Fictional people that capture different types of people. Different demographics. Useful iff they are valid.
     • SCENARIOS
       • What a person might do with your design. Specifies goals but not interaction details. Help to envision and design ideas. Related to use-cases except that these are used before design
     • ARGUMENT
       • Explaining the problem you're solving to the people. Scale of the problem, consequences, events that trigger
     • NOT INTUITIVE
       • Differences in community w.r.t who is being served, why and what and how it impacts