Phase 2 | Exploratory Research | 02.17.2018
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 focused on the preparation of our exploratory phase presentation. We spent a great deal of time synthesizing our findings from the workshop we conducted last week. we also reflected on the workshop what went right, things we could improve, what methods were the most helpful in gaining information.
Participatory research Workshop —Reflection
- Prompts that were more specific like the “letter to the past self” or “draw your most awkward moment” got us more qualitative data, the narratives were richer with more specific details.
- Should we have given more specific points on the journey map? Though we could discover overall patterns and draw conclusions based on it, I wonder if a more controlled timeline would have given us more time specific behavior/mood pattern.
- Pizza helps!!
Exploratory Research Synthesis
We decided to present the findings of both our stages and explain the reason why we chose only a specific group to conduct the work shop with. We felt this it was important to communicate the thoughts and reasons behind our decisions. ( The feedback from our peers made it clear how important this decision is, views varied amongst classmates about how ideal it was to select students as the focus group moving forward)
Exploratory Research Key Insights
We funneled down our synthesis to 5 main key insights and their design implications.
They were :
People mostly rely on social interaction as a way of learning and adapting to a new culture. Few uses structured courses or apps.
People can’t prepare for every situation. Sometimes they need help in the moment of an interaction.
Community and a social network are an important means for learning about and adjusting to a new culture
Language exacerbates a lot of other barriers immigrants face.
Resources for immigrants are fragmented and hard to find.
Exploratory Research Presentation | Feedback
The presentation was received over all though we were bombarded with question during the Q&A. There were quite a few question about if choosing student as the focus group was the right way to go or not. Another, major point of discussion was our decision not to focus on language singularly as people felt it was the foremost problem that people faced while immigrating to a new country.
Here is some of the feedback we recieved. Link to class feedback.
Next steps
- Additional research related to capabilities of Ai and users’ comfort level with new technologies
- Do generative research and narrow down opportunity space to arrive at a defined concept
