02.10.2018 | Exploratory Research 2
Process documentation for Interaction Design Studio II, taught by Peter Scupelli at Carnegie Mellon University. Team comprises of Zach Bachiri, Devika Khowala,Hajira Qazi, and Shengzhi Wu.
This week we made a significant progress in exploratory research. Besides of talking to subject matter experts and conducting online surveys, we decided to do a focus group in order to gather more detailed insights from our potential users.
After making an affinity diagram, we thought the main problems of social and culture acclimation is : Language barrier, social interaction, operational barrier(logistic), as well as finding community.
Around these four domains, we decided to utilize several research methods in our focus group to help us narrow down scenario and potential painpoints. But the difficulties is how to use different research methods while ensuring these methods are asking different aspects of the problem rather than overlap each other.
Thus, we came up with a concept called “A letter to past your self”, which is similar to “break up letter”. We asked users to write a letter to the past themselves of what they wish they would have known before coming to US.
The other method is a kind of user journey, and we invite users to map out all the milestones or key moments of their experience living in US.
And we also had a graffiti wall hanging in studio on which anyone can put down their thoughts about cultural acclimation.
We also had a storyboard for our focus group so users can use drawings to visualise their feelings and awkwardness. But regrading to the storyboard, we had an argument about whether the non-design background users would feel comfortable for sketching and drawings.
We recruited some international students at CMU by sending email and post posters, and provide free pizza and snacks to encourage students to come.
We held the focus group research on Friday(02/09) noon, and ultimately 13 international students attended our activities, and their average time spend within the research is over 25 minutes, which is good for us to gather enough and useful information. But a small problem is most of them are design students, so we weren’t able to have a diverse user samples. But users are consisted of Chinese, Indian, Korea and Taiwan, which contains the most typical countries of international students.
Then, we started to analyse the data we got during our research to get some insights by doing a affinity mapping, and of course many of the painpoints they mentioned are similar and can be categorised into the same groups.
Moreover, we also started to outline our presentations for Wednesday.
