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UCA: Data Gathering Techniques. Overview.
- 1. Leonardo da Vinci Partnerships Project GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES Introduction to User-Centred Analysis (UCA) Data Gathering Techniques Overview Cristina Cachero This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme
- 2. Leonardo da Vinci Partnerships Project GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES It is made up of three disciplines: User-Centered Analysis (UCA) User-Centered Design (UCD) Usability Testing (UT) It’s an iterative process This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme 2 User-Centred Development Source: ISO 13407
- 3. Leonardo da Vinci Partnerships Project GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES UCA: set of activities and techniques to discover… Who are the users How they think and work Which are the objectives and aims of the different stakeholders Gathers data about: User profiles Working environment Task scenarios (how and why users interact with the interface Content Navigation structures This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme 3 User-Centred Analysis
- 4. Leonardo da Vinci Partnerships Project GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme 4 User-Centred Data Gathering Techniques Using more than one technique prevents biases in the gathered data (researcher is with the user while the data is being gathered) (researcher looks at data previously gathered from the user) Interviews (Traditional/ Contextual) Diaries/Journals Card Sorting Surveys Focus Groups Observations Task/Activity analysis Web analytics (search logs, Google analytics, etc.) Customer feedback reports Help desk reports Call Center reports Other people’s insights (people working at help desks, call centers, …) Self-Reported Observed Indirect Direct Collection method Participant Involvement
- 5. Leonardo da Vinci Partnerships Project GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES These slides are made available under the license Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND. More information about license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. These slides were created under Leonardo daVinci Partnerships Project 2012-1-PL1-LEO04-28181 GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES ( http://usability-accessibility.org/). This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme 5 Attributions
- 6. Leonardo da Vinci Partnerships Project GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES These slides are made available under the license Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND. More information about license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. These slides were created under Leonardo daVinci Partnerships Project 2012-1-PL1-LEO04-28181 GUI USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY: EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES ( http://usability-accessibility.org/). This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme 5 Attributions
Editor's Notes
- Hello, my name is Cristina Cachero, and I am associate professor at the University of Alicante. In this video I am going to introduce you into the main data gathering techniques proposed as part of a User-Centered Development process.
- As mentioned in a previous presentation, the User-Centered Development paradigm proposes an iterative development process that is made up of three disciplines or workflows. The first one is the User-Centered Analysis, where the development team (which ideally will include developers, domain experts and usability experts) understands and specifies the context of use of the application, and defines the user and organizational requirements. The, during the User-Centered Design workflow, the development team produces the design solutions taking into account well-known usability design heuristics to progressively come up with more refined versions of the application, in a typical prototype-based approach. Last, it defines a Usability testing workflow, where the usability team evaluates the design against requirements and provides feedback for the next iteration of the process. In this course we are centering around the first of the three workflows, that is, the User-Centered Analysis.
- The UCA workflow provides a set of activities and techniques to answer three main questions. The first question is Who are the users of my application? This means discovering Which different groups can be distinguished and which are the characteristics that differentiate them that may influence the interface design. The second question is How do these user groups think and work? This will shape what do they expect/need to find in the application and how must these features/information be organized The third question revolves around which are the objectives and aims of the different stakeholders? Such stakeholders include those not directly working with the application. Take into account that not only the end user but also the organization that ordered the application in the first place must be happy with the result. In order to answer these questions, the different techniques proposed in the UCA allow the usability expert to gather data about things such as user profiles, working environments, task scenarios, and content and navigation structures.
- How does the usability analyst gather these data? Along the years, a myriad of data gathering techniques have been proposed, each one with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Broadly speaking, these techniques can be classified into two orthogonal dimensions: The first dimension concerns the collection method. According to this dimension, data gathering techniques can be classified as either direct or indirect techniques. Direct collection involves some type of face-to-face activity between the usability analyst and the research participant. The biggest advantage of all direct research methods is that, because you’re with the participant, you can not only check that you have correctly understood what the research participant is saying, but also explore any issues of interest as they arise, even if they were not foreseen in advance. Indirect collection is done without any face-to-face contact with the participant. These methods often have one big advantage: they can collect a lot of information -as compared with direct methods-. The second dimension concerns the participant involvement. According to this dimension, data gathering techniques can be classified as either self-reported or observed. On the one hand, self-reported methods rely on the participant telling you what they think they do. The data gathered with self-reported methods may suffer from some particularly dangerous biases, since people aren’t particularly good at knowing -let alone explain to others- how or why they do something (or even what they do). Observed methods, on the other hand, involve seeing how people actually do something, and their biggest strength is their authenticity – all the behaviour is real. You may have noticed that we have placed Interviews somewhere in the middle between self reported and observed. The reason is that depending on the type of interview the classification varies. Traditional interviews are usually done out of the participant's usual workplace (and therefore are a purely self-reported technique). However, in contextual interviews (also called contextual inquiries) the researcher observes the user while performing the tasks and then asks any question. Therefore contextual interviews are an observed technique. We do strongly advise you to use more than one method when gathering data for your usability study, and particularly to combine self-reporting with observation, since in this way you will increase your chances of basing your decisions on reliable data.
- In the next video, we will briefly review some of these techniques. So keep tuned!