ixd303 week 02

This week we are looking at research techniques. First we looked at Needs Driven Design, this is essentially asking yourself, ‘Does this product need to exist?’ if yes, make it as unique as possible and answer user needs to solve goals you have and need t0 satisfy. We then went on to do a quick miro exercise.

Miro Exercise

Research local health centres online, look to see if you can find the following elements

  • opening hours
  • how to book an appointment, how to order a prescription
  • out of hours details

For this I quickly researched my local health centre and found the website to not offer working elements. A lot of the links lead to the same page displaying either ‘Order prescriptions’ or ‘Contact’. But this wasn’t great either as when clicking on order prescriptions it takes you to a different site that requires log in access. The whole webpage is poorly designed and the text and text colour used makes you get lost and/or skip over important information when scrolling.

Looking at Competitor Analysis, you would look at what is out there and break it down. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Understand the market you are researching, spot industry trends and discuss. In this context the direct competitor will be other GP websites. User Journey Mapping is another research method that allows you to break the journey down into steps through time. Following this we did a group exercise with our research teams to conduct a user journey map. Picking one health centre website and look at these steps in time

  • registering as a new patient
  • find list of GP’s
  • book an appointment
  • bind opening hours ad out of hours services
  • ordering prescriptions

Below is what we as team came up with. Overall the website needs major updates and work. We found the biggest issue was for a lot of things like registration, ordering prescriptions and booking appointments you need to ring up to the health centre at a specific time in the morning. I found this exercise to be useful to understand how to break down a problem and find an end solution in a step to step method. It was also good to work in a team for this exercise as it helped seeing what others came up with that I maybe would of missed.

Bias and Research

There is three different types Bias, Conscious, unconscious, cognitive and selective.

Conscious – We have pre-conceived impressions we take to things. This can also give us a sense of identity to make good decisions.

Unconscious – We have to make sure not to be deploying unintentional bias or favouritism. We rely on mental shortcuts: they dictate the direction we’re going with our research.

Cognitive – leads to misinterpreting information and can be problematic. Avoiding cognitive bias we avoid the creation of subjective social reality (system patterns). This type of bias describes a tendency to notice, focus and give credence to what fits our already existing beliefs

Selective – Systematic error in association or outcome. Certain news media will cut apart ‘fake news’. Others will add to the bias as truth.

Postel’s Law – “Be conservative in what you do. Be liberal in what you accept from others.”

Be empathic, flexible and tolerant of actions a user could take. Anticipate virtually everything in terms of input and provide a reliable accessible interface. Define boundaries for input.

Chunking – This refers to breaking big data into smaller pieces to make it easier to digest. For example a credit card card number is printed broken into chunks

After looking at Bias and Research we did a in pairs exercise to design an online patient registration form. I was paired with Matthew and we decided to both sketch up some quick layouts and plan where to put the content provided. Once we were happy with a layout we went to Figma.

Below are our sketches

Below is what we came up with in Figma. The idea was a scroll through application that could be submitted via the big ‘submit’ button at the end. The colour blocks to help indicate different sections and the colour palette of greys as they are easily differentiated. Overall given the time limit of 45 minutes I think we did a good job as it’s easily read and easy to follow through for the user.

Qualitative vs Quantitative

Qualitative: unstructured, subjective, immeasurable, soft science, based on theories

Qualitative research – This is a primary exploratory phase. With this you are best to stick to the basics, any questions asked should be open-minded.

Quantitative: structured, objective, measurable, hard science, numbers data, trends etc., testing hard theory and facts.

Interviews and Observations – Challenge assumptions, gather user requirements, get out of the building. Goals, behaviour, context, results. Identify needs and motivation and you can learn a lot just by watching people. Online surveys are an easy way to gather quantitative and qualitative user requirements that are powerful and useful

This week’s lecture has been quite useful for understanding in depth different methods of research. I found doing the group task of creating a user journey map to be most useful and this will help aid me in further research for this project. Continuing on this week I plan to look more into the topic of how UX can help someone with a disability in their day to day activities. I should start considering ideas for a digital product and conduct competitor analysis to see what is currently available, at what mass and what the market is in need of.

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