Week 4 To-Do’s
Lecture and reading
Attend the lecture to learn about this week’s topics and obtain extra information from this week’s reading list (short articles/videos to read/watch). More details are available on the Schedule page.
Draft interview and questionnaire questions
First, using the personas as a guide, decide who the participants for your user interviews will be. Second, draft the interview and questionnaire questions. Using the empathy maps, decide what do you need/want to know. Come up with 3 high-level aspects you want to get from the users. For each high-level aspect, come up with at least 3 specific points, and think about which ones you want to ask on questionnaires or in interviews. Demographic/background questions are essential but will not be counted towards actual questions. Your design document should contain:
- At least 4 interview questions, besides demographic/background questions.
- At least 8 questionnaire questions, besides demographic/background questions.
Plan and mock your interview session
Do a mock interview session with 1 person from the class (but not in your team). Pretend this is the real thing and go through all the steps (e.g., explain, obtain consent, interview, wrap up with thank you letter). Check the Resources page for these documents. During the interview session, check the time often so that you don’t run over 20 minutes. Ask both interview and questionnaire questions. Take notes. After the interviews, update the design document with:
- Summary of what you learned, including any surprises.
- Describe any changes to your interview/questionnaire questions and procedure based on what you found.
Interview at least 3 users
Find users who are not students in the class to interview, following a similar procedure in your mock interview session (asking both questionnaire and interview questions). Make sure you obtain their verbal consent responses, and store these responses in a spreadsheet. Keep your raw interview data private and viewable to your team only; do not put the raw data (notes and images) in the design document. Make sure that the data is anonymized and stored in a password-protected computer, data server or cloud service.
In the raw data or any report summarizing the data, interviewees should be referred to by their code names (e.g., P1, P2) instead of their real names. For each interview, add a section to the design document to capture:
- A summary of your findings in the interview.
- A description of any changes to your interview/questionnaire questions or procedures that you plan to introduce in the future exploratory study based on what you learned.
Team meeting and design document
Conduct this week’s team meeting or discussion in and/or out of class. Update your design document with the meeting minutes and the outcomes of this week’s activities. More details are available on the Information page under Deliverable 2a.
Set up Miro and Figma (if not done yet)
You will need Miro next week, and Figma during the last few weeks of the course. You should have signed up for an account for both Miro and Figma using your UWaterloo email, and apply for their Education plans: