Planning User Studies
We had to narrow down the topics we identified last week to a more well-defined area of interest (AOI). Initially, we had some difficulty making a choice between public transportation, social anxiety, urban agriculture, and polluted cities.
We managed to eliminate public transportation early on, mostly because we felt too limited by the constraints the AOI implies. To help ourselves chose between the remaining three, we applied The Who, What, Where, When, Why, How framework. This would help to gain a thorough understanding of its stakeholders and the facts and values involved in each AOI.
We ended up packaging urban agriculture and polluted cities under the theme of urban health.
Social anxiety was also eliminated, as we didn’t feel it had the same potential as the other areas. However, we didn’t manage to make a decision between urban agriculture and polluted cities, so we ended up packaging them under the theme of urban health.
After defining an AOI we could agree on, it was time to define our users, dig for potential contacts, and research whom in our local vicinity we could pay a visit. We created a compact timeline to keep track of deadlines for the remainder of the project (by when we wanted what ready).
Now that we had a plan and had identified potential users, it was time to actually get in contact with people involved in our AOI and start preparing questions. This will hopefully allow us to generate some initial user profiles. Next week will be spent conducting our user studies, and analyzing the knowledge that we will gain from them.
