Week 3

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Design Notebook Entry for D2

During the studio activity, you conducted mock interviews with several teams. Write up what you learned: Which questions seemed confusing to your interviewees? Which questions were best at drawing out the most interesting information? What questions did you realize that you were missing? What recommendations did your partner teams give you on how your interview questions and procedures can be improved? In addition, based on these lessons learned, document your new / refined set of interview questions in the design notebook. You must finalize the interview questions and check with your TA and get their approval before proceeding to PO1.

PO1: User Interviews - Informational Interview

In PO1, find 1-2 users to interview; someone who is not a student in CS449/649 class. Before you conduct interviews, all members of the team must watch the lecture video "Important Rules for Project Interviews". The video contains important ethics guidelines and rules that you must adhere to. The video was recorded during Covid, and so it mostly describes procedures for online interviews. In-person interviews follow the same procedures.

In the design notebook, you will summarize your findings from each interview. For each interview, add a section to the design notebook to capture (1) a summary of your findings, (2) a description of any changes to your interview questions or procedures that you plan to introduce in future interviews based on what you learned. Your team can decide how to spread out the interviews. For example, you could do 1 this week, then 3 the following week, and the remaining 2-4 during week 5. It's up to you. Just make sure that in total, you interview 6-8 unique people who are meant to be your target user (people who are likely going to be the primary audience for your app).

Below is a brief summary of the ethics rules:

● To recruit users, you can use word of mouth (e.g., people you know, friends of friends) via a variety of channels (e.g., email, phone call, social media, chat interfaces such as Slack). When using social media / chat interfaces (e.g., Facebook group, Slack workspace), you should post only if the norm of the social media / chat group permits this type of study recruitment posts. If in doubt, first check with the social media / chat group owner before posting. You must use this recruitment script in your email, phone call, or chat/social media post when recruiting participants.

● Make sure you obtain consent from the participants before starting an interview. You will find all the consent forms on the Resources page of the course website. For PO1, you should be using the informational interviews consent forms for in-person interviews or online interviews. You will obtain verbal consent from the participants (see the last page of the consent forms) and store their verbal consent responses in a spreadsheet in a password-protected computer, data server or cloud service; the TAs and instructors might ask to see this spreadsheet at a later time. This spreadsheet should have the participant name, date of interview, and participants' responses to each of the verbal consent questions. You must keep this spreadsheet separate from your interview data and securely stored for a minimum of 1 year.

● Note that participants are allowed to withdraw from the study at any time. There are also NO audio or video recordings allowed, so take good notes.

● Remember to keep your raw interview data (e.g., your notes) private and viewable to your team only; DO NOT put the raw data (notes and images) in the design notebook. Only include a summary of your findings in your writeup. Make sure that the data is anonymized (i.e., with no identifying information) 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, P16) instead of their real names.

● Your interviewees must be adult (age 19+). Our ethics protocol does NOT allow you to interview children. Note that the definition of minor varies by province. To be safe, interview someone who is 19+. You should also stay away from interviewing students/employees in K-12 schools and hospital staff (e.g., doctor, nurses), because doing so would involve the school board's and the hospital's ethics board. If you were to interview an employee of a company/organization about work-related things, you will also need permission from their manager (using the manager in-person and online interview consent forms) before conducting the interviews with the employees.

P4: Prepare for Data Analysis

Watch lecture video on "Work Models". Bring the interview data from both D2 and PO1 to the next studio class; we will analyze these data using work models and affinity diagramming.

CH1: Challenge Report - Notes

The challenge report, due in week 8, documents how your team has challenged your assumptions each week. To build up to that, record some notes about how you have challenged your assumptions this week. For example, what assumptions did you make when you created the personas? What interview questions did you create to test these assumptions? What did you learn? What are your new assumptions? How did you refine your interview questions to test these new assumptions? Be specific, and describe the concrete actions your team took to test assumptions. Complete the CH1 section of the design notebook under Week 3.