CS160 Discussion Section 6 Task Analysis Postmortem David Sun March 06, 2007

Contextual Inquiry and Task Analysis Pre-inquiry questions –carefully selecting these questions don’t say too much about what your project is about, e.g., our goal is to create a novel application to better support classroom/home maintenance/physical activities. shouldn’t describe the application platform, e.g. we are going to use PDA/cellphone to better support these activities. shouldn’t ask users whether and how they go about performing various tasks. –biasing your respondents: demand response –leave more project specific questions to the after-inquiry debrief Explaining what changed between inquiries –be sure to explain exactly what changed and why

Contextual Inquiry Observe people because what they say they do and what they actually do are often different. Make sure you really follow the contextual inquiry principles: –Master-apprentice relationship; stay away from interviewer/interviewee relationship: you aren’t there to get a list of questions answered. –Stay in context: gather ongoing experience rather than summary experience, i.e., it’s not an questionnaire. –Alternate between watching and probing, i.e., it’s not an observational study; work with customers to obtain a shared understanding of the work structure. –Design ideas are the end product of a chaining of reasoning: verify your interpretation of data with the user.

Contextual Inquiry Interviews (Process influenced more by designers) Observations (Process influenced more by end-users) Contextual inquiry (Process influenced by both designers and end-users) Where does contextual inquiry fit in? Karen Holtzblatt and Sandra Jones. Conducting and Analyzing a Contextual Interview. In Schuler and Namioka, Participatory Design: Principles and Practices, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993, pp. 177, , ,

Task Analysis If respondents performed tasks they don’t normally do, be careful about drawing conclusions. Tasks should be instantiated after synthesizing your contextual inquiry data.

Lo-Fi Prototyping Pros and cons to making lo-fi prototype to scale But should have the “frame” and buttons to help test users identify with PDA/Cellphone

Lo-Fi Prototyping Tips Articulate your design decisions: –Demonstrate your design is informed by the inquiry study, not based on intuition alone. –Refer to your task analysis data. –Be specific and concrete. –50% of the overall marks. Basic rhetorical writing –Making a case Give evidence Show the reasoning from evidence to conclusion. –Writing in an organized fashion Section headings Transition sentences

Administrivia Create a website for your project if you haven’t – us with the URL. Class participation –Best to write a note (paper/ ) to me immediately after class. Midterm review section next week – me in advance if you’d like certain topics to be covered. Team evaluation due 3/12.