Interaction and Usability

Discovery Methods

To design an interface that suits its user needs you need to first collect data to determine how to make it function well. You cannot simple think in the mind of the user, you need to go out and gather information from the public. The researcher will use qualitative and quantitative data to gather information from the target audience before designing the interface.

The researcher will firstly interview the stakeholders to find out a possible clientele and gain knowledge of the industry. There are four main types of interviews which include open ended,  structured, semi structured and unstructured. These are named to how much control the interviewer imposes on the conversation after asking the predetermined questions. The researcher intends to use open questions to gather expand on the interviewees personal experiences and opinions. The types of questions asked will be to determine whether or not this could help customers/clients where to decide to eat. Also it will help determine the best way to design the interface based on the answers given. The stakeholders with relevance to the researchers interface will be restaurant owners. This will be a semi-structured interview meaning that it will combine features of structured and unstructured interviews. This will be done by asked both closed and open questions to get a wide variety of answers. He will use a notepad to jot down the responses and also take an mp3 recorder to listen back just in case anything is missed. It is important to keep up with the respondent and to not interrupt them while they are in mid flow of answering. It is important to not phrase a question to suggest that a particular answer is expected.  You don’t want to encourage the interviewee to agree with you because otherwise you are not going to get a range of responses.

To gather knowledge from the members of the public the researcher will create a questionnaire to determine how to navigate through the interface and help to influence the design. Questionairres is a well known technique for collecting users opinions. Typically this will use closed questions with certain responses to select from. Once you have collected back all of the questionairres you can then use diagrams to determine the responses (pie or bar charts etc). Questionairres can be used on their own or with other methods (interviews, focus groups etc) to clarify understanding. It is important that questions are specific and easy to understand. Because this interface has an open ended target audience meaning that it is designed to help people of all ages, the questions should be easy to answer from any age. Most questionaires start by asking for some basic information such as gender and age. When designing a questionnaire the first thing to think about is the order and structure of the questions because the impact of a question can be influenced by the question order. Also you must clearly indicate instructions at the beginning of the questionnaire as to how to fill it in. This can range from ticking a box or circling an answer. If you want to gain more knowledge on particular questions to determine why they answered that way, you must give them the option to tell you. This can be done by indicating that if you answered a question in a certain way, why you did so.