Reading Seminar Group Discussion

Reading Seminar Group Discussion

The questions we discussed were as follows:

• How does one obtain qualitative results that are as reliable as possible?
• Why is there no clear consensus definition when it comes to User centered system designs? and how would we benefit from having one/ or not having one ?
• How do we ensure that the data we get correlates with what they do in reality?
• How can we articulate and establish the requirements so that we can set clear and precise objectives to work towards?

We discussed our project and the limitations thereof, as our project is of a qualitative nature we deemed it hard to actually pinpoint a specific method that would be a best fit. Thus we deduced general guidelines for how to obtain reliable results. First of, extract the data needed through a general framework of questions/data-obtaining method and as much as one can one should try to stick to the same questions and/or framework. In summary, we concluded that we must try to systematize as much as possible in order for any results to be as reliable as possible.

The concept of UCSD (User Centered System Designs) was a term coined in the late 80s and pretty much explains itself. The term has overtime, however, both according to us, and the authors of the article for the reading seminar been described as a term that carries absolutely no meaning. It simply means that one should think about the user while designing the product, but one does not have to ask or question the user, thus reducing it to a basically meaningless phrase.  We discussed the possibility of implementing a framework for UCSD is non existent since as stated above we and other professionals deemed the phrase meaningless, although that is not to say that the concept as a whole is meaningless, and maybe we will use the concept behind UCSD.  

Since people could give answers that they perceive is the right answer or what they think we want to hear, which is a legitimate worry since these biases exist. So what we propose is that the questions regarding how they use the available infrastructure at the stations should be completed with observations. For example if they say that they never spend time looking at the time tables but we can clearly see in our observations that they do, then we can disregard the data gathered for these questions and fill it in with the observations instead. This will make it so that our data will overall have higher quality and allow us to make more accurate conclusions which in turn allows for better analysis of the data gathered.    

Regarding the clarification of objectives we came to the conclusion that we should form some kind of hypothesis regarding the current technologies and infrastructure available so that we have some grounding in the theory. With this grounding we will then gather the data that we see fit and based on the data that is gathered we will then sit down and reevaluate our hypothesis to see how well our perception of the situation correlated with reality.

Overall, our group had taken away a couple of key points for the study which were:

• To set a clear framework for our project before we conduct anything
• To be user-centered and to focus on our specific target group.
• Try to set up our framework so that it removes as many biases that we can, thus removing as much uncertainty as possible.