Janet Chang’s Blog about Design

High-Definition User Research

Speaker: Rob Tannen, Bresslergroup
Date: September 20, 2008

Characteristics of Research Tools

Current Usage

Article – 21th Century Technology for Usability and User Interface Design Activities.

Some survey…

Data Collection – Software designer tend to use online survey and online analytics more than product designer. But pretty consistent data collections used.

Analysis – spreadsheet most common. Very few using qualitative analysis software.

Knowledge and Satisfaction – big lack of knowledge and satisfaction in the research field. (the gap and need presents an opportunity).

The basic characteristics of effective user research tools

• Documentation
• Measurement – it can be a sub-category of documentation.
• Efficiency
• Enhancement – i.e. eye tracking.

Mora 3 is a multidimensional tool that has many if not all of the research characteristics.

Reviews of New Technologies

Livescribe Pulse

• It writes and record. also recording what’s being written. Both actions are sync up.
• Flaw: it rolls!

Many Eyes (by IBM)

• Nice visualization features both quantitative and qualitative.
• Flaw: it’s free, and it’s public. You can create it and immediately delete it.

High-speed Imagery

• Casio EXF1 Pro recommended for its versatility
• 30 images/second to capture study’s process in details (something they can’t describe well ‘casue it’s done subconsciously).
• High-speed video don’t look as good under poor lighting. Slow motion not as good unless it’s high-end video.

User Research Technology Concept

Field CREW – contextual research workstation

• wireless, multi-channel video management
• touch screen, writable interface
• Configurable hard-keys for rapid event tagging
• Speech to text transcription
• Sub-vocalization to text transcription
• Integrated storage/recharge for wireless components

Train a team of research, there’s usually a facilitator/note taker and video-grapher. It’s hard to do it all by 1 person.

The tool focus on data collecting, but subsequently it also improve the data anglicizing.