Open Fieldnotes in Remote Interviews

TL;DR: Make fieldnotes in a document shared with the participant, go over the notes together at the end of the research session

In qualitative research I do at work, participants of the research talk to me and demonstrate things while I (or a note taker) write notes to remember …

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Use of artifacts in design projects

This post started as a presentation I gave to a group of computer science students in a HCI class as an invited practitioner. My first intention was to “talk about work”, show some currently worked-on projects and introduce to the order and mess of roles, projects and tasks in software …

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What do plans to do?

"The view, that purposeful action is determined by plans, is deeply rooted in the Western human sciences as the correct model of the rational actor."

– Lucy Suchman in Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, p. 27

Plans are deemed to be important. But what do plans do? And what do …

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Using scenarios in design

Recently, I rediscovered Scenarios as a tool in the design process.

If you don’t know scenarios: They are mini-stories with possible users as characters. Take this very short one as an example:

A parent is worried about a ten-year old refusing to drink milk and wants to know if …

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Alternatives to face-to-face interviews

The meet-in-real-life, face-to-face interview may be the standard for qualitative user research – but other methods of talking and observing your users are more then just alternatives to it and may have their own unique advantages (and disadvantages).

Our initial use case for online interviews/observation was getting access to remote …

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