- Learning from existing products
- Looking for patterns in people’s behavior
Cultural Probes
- designed to provoke and capture the inspirational response that describes a relationship between an individual and a product
- Used to learn about people’s lives and provide data do designers
- Used at the concept development stage of the design process
Competitor product analysis
- Process in which a product and its competitors are evaluated in order to establish a list of issues that need to be addressed in order to compete effectively in the marketplace or add more functions or features to the product that hadn’t been considered before
Literature Reviews
- Examines published scholarly articles, papers, books, and others to provide an informed description related to a particular issue or area of exploration
- Informed opinion and perspective on the subject
- Stages: identifying issues, literature search, literature evaluation, and analysis and interpretation
Internet Searches: searching for information and evaluating its quality
Cultural comparison:
- Address the specific need of these diverse audiences
- Research method that uses personal or published accounts to reveal differences in behaviors and artifacts between cultures
- Cultural sensibilities, not everyone responds the same way
Roleplaying
- Gaining better understanding of the users
- Project future scenarios
- Focused, rehearsed, realistic and feedback
Try it yourself
- Gain appreciation of how a product is experienced by actual users
- Exploring by doing
- Record experience
Mind mapping
- Visual representation of hierarchial information
- Think and learn better, solve problems, creativity, and flexibility
- Avoid linear thinking
- Concept mapping
Sampling
- Gain knowledge from a small group of individuals that can be used to describe the whole population
- Instead of surveying
- Not a guarantee that the sample will denote its population
- Methods: Probability methods (random sampling), quota methods, selective methods, convenience methods, ethnographic methods
How to write a literature review
- Problem formulation
- Data collection
- Data evaluation
- Analysis and interpretation
