As I was reading through my site yesterday, I realized that while I show the end result of a lot I have accomplished, I’ve not included a full glimpse into my research process.
While I work on remedying this long term, I’ve put together some artifacts in Google Drive. These are not fully documented for various reasons, but I am hoping can spark some dialogue regarding my methods. This post is a bit more casual than my other posts, and will likely be edited a few times, as some of it is recalling thoughts from a while ago when designing and piloting studies.
A script I spent a lot of time honing deals with users sense of data ownership over the data generated by using applications on their smartphone. For this one we had to be careful not to prime the users regarding privacy and data sharing, so piloted extensively to get that right. Another challenge creating this script dealt with pushing users to express their thought process and come up with answers to the questions, even when they didn’t know the answers. I had to ease them into it by starting in known territory and pushing the boundaries with a lot of follow up questions. The interview ended up being much longer than planned averaging in at 75 minutes a piece, as users tended to get really into expressing their thoughts once they were pushed to think about things more deeply. I’m kicking myself I don’t have enough time to rerun it before graduating, as I think it would be interesting to see the differences in the data before and after the recent dialogue regarding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
I’ve been learning a ton by working with the amazing Marshini Chetty and Frank Li on the System Admin/ Dev OPs software update project. At first we had difficulty recruiting system admins, but once we did found so many enthusiastic participants. My biggest take away from this study was how important ethnographic research is for recruiting specialized user groups. During that study I ended up really tied into an amazing community I knew nothing about before beginning the project.
This study on personality perceptions on and offline was a pet project of mine during the fall. I actually ended up writing and presenting on it as a class project in Kent Norman’s Cyberpsychology class rather than the original study I had designed on corporate surveillance. I needed a light hearted topic to go in hand with talks about data ownership and System Administrators/ Dev Ops updates. At some point I’d like to delve into more special interest online communities and their experiences with meeting in person. More than anything I was surprised how little discrepancy this study uncovered, but would be curious to explore if that was true for other groups as well.
Last July I ran a usability study on Indaba during my UX internship there, in collaboration with Jon Berry. Some artifacts (minus the final report) can be found in this folder. The biggest regret I have with this study was not having a more representative sample, we weren’t able to find enough members of our very niche audience, so tested on researchers in general. This was able to help us find quite a few bugs, but we weren’t able to test the content as fully as I wish we had been able to.
Earlier that summer in May I had developed iterations of a high fidelity Invision prototype, with feedback provided by Jon and Lacey at Amida. I need to reassemble the Invision application, the one that is up was for a demo and I no longer have edit access, but the Sketch screens are here in their entirety. I would recommend that one over the other as the Invision that is up was built to show functionality rather than for testing purposes.
Then I had additional documentation for Smatch including the poster presented to it at UX Insights in here as well.
Lisa Marie Rogers 