Summary and Schedule
Carpentries style lesson on ux research methods for making design decisions in scientific software. TODO! add more.
Objectives:
- Identify high priority usability issues for your software project and its users
- Recruit for a user study
- Identify risks of participation in a study and ways of addressing those
- Determine an appropriate approach to usability evaluation
- Conduct a rapid usability assessment and semistructured interview
- Develop and refine an interview protocol
- Rapidly analyze user study data
- Report findings from qualitative user research
- ???something to connect to design decisions
Prerequisite
We feel confident about:
- Have an example software that they can apply the lesson learnings and exercises to
- general understanding of grant funding requirements
- know/have an idea of what a GUI is
- Know/have an idea of what a ‘user’ is
- general understanding of iterative development styles
- web browser use
- have some coding experience (html/markdown) >> not required, but expecting for our primary audiences
- what a readme is
We feel less confident about: * knowledge of product lifecycle * What github/gitlab/repo’s are * Markdown * Active listening * Interpret metrics/feedback? * Understanding what feedback loops are
| Setup Instructions | Download files required for the lesson | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 1. Choosing a Research Method |
What distinguishes any method from another, i.e. are ther different
method types? -How will learners know which methods are the right ones for their research? What ethical considerations do learners need to take into account when choosing a method? How does the research plan effect method selection? |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 2. Preparing your User Study and Recruiting Participants |
How do I determine who my target audience is for a user study? What are the risks I should consider before conducting a user study and how do I proactively mitigate them? How do I ensure that I connect with and recruit participants from the chosen target audience? What materials do I need to prepare before conducting an interview? |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 3. Conducting a user study |
How can you efficiently take or create notes about each participant’s
session in your user study? How can you productively stray from your interview protocol? How do you know when you have enough data? |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 4. Interpreting results |
How do I know that this is the most appropriate method to use for
prioritisation? How can I know that i’m interpreting user feedback correctly? How can i know that the grouping and labelling is the correct way to group and label? Know i have feedback that i can apply to my highest priorities, how can I define an action or a change informed by this feedback? |
| Duration: 00h 12m | 5. Connecting the Dots and Next steps |
How to remember to use the right method in the right scenario? What are the next steps to designing features in a user interface? |
| Duration: 00h 12m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
FIXME: Setup instructions live in this document. Please specify the tools and the data sets the Learner needs to have installed.
Data Sets
Download the data zip file and unzip it to your Desktop
Software Setup
Details
Setup for different systems can be presented in dropdown menus via a
spoiler tag. They will join to this discussion block, so
you can give a general overview of the software used in this lesson here
and fill out the individual operating systems (and potentially add more,
e.g. online setup) in the solutions blocks.
Use PuTTY
Use Terminal.app
Use Terminal