You will be observing another person — we suggest another Stanford student — engaging in an everyday activity to discover opportunities for design innovation.
Discovery is the root of good design. By observation of a carefully selected individual, you will create a comprehensive picture of the practice of a specific activity related to your chosen product concept – e.g., completing morning errands, attending a party, communicating with friends, going out to dinner.
This approach to discovery is called needfinding. Needfinding is typically performed with a small population of 5-10 representative individuals, but in the interest of time you only need to observe one person. Needfinding was covered in class lecture on Tuesday, September 29. In your fieldwork you are attempting to uncover user needs, breakdowns, and opportunities for improvement of a specific practice. Your observation may or may not include the user actually using their mobile phone. If you are designing a mobile phone interface for a task that doesn't yet exist on the phone, you'll be observing users doing the task as they do it now. You'll identify software features and opportunities for the software to solve existing problems this way. On the other hand, you may be designing a product to improve an existing mobile phone interaction (e.g. calling friends, doing email). In these cases, you'll want to observe your user doing the task in situ, that is, using their phone to do the actual task in the actual environment.
After your observation is complete, you will distill your findings into specific user needs: opportunities for design innovation that would enable mobile phones to better support the activity you observed. If applicable, you should also include any breakdowns you observed. These needs will inform ideas for your group projects next week.
Begin by selecting a specific activity to observe, and form a distinct plan for making observations. Your plan should include setting goals, deciding on methods, and creating templates for recording observations. You will want to observe the successes, breakdowns, and latent opportunities that occur when mobile phones are used, not used, or could be used to support your chosen activity.
Next, select an individual to observe. Choose someone who is not similar to yourself, e.g. a friend with a different major. Ask that person to participate in this assignment and get permission from him/her. Plan to follow that friend for 1 hour, observing her or him during the selected activity. Be sure you coordinate with your participant to select a time that will be rich for observations. Be sure to tell the participant to perform the task as realistically as possible, while communicating to you as appropriate.
During the observation, in addition to taking notes using your prepared templates, use digital photographs to document activities. Do not use a video camera. After the 1 hour of observations, spend 15 to 30 minutes interviewing him or her about the mobile phone use that you observed. It should take you approximately 1 hour to make observations if you have planned carefully. It will take longer if you haven’t!
Once your observation is complete, prepare a summary of your method and results. Your write up should include:
In the next two assignments, you will create a group and begin the design of a product or service that will meet some of the needs you have identified here. Final group project topics will be selected from the ideas that come out of assignments 2 & 3.
Your summary will be submitted online as a body of plain text and a series of digital photograph attachments. Do not spend time "beautifying" your summary.
The submission website can be accessed through the course website with your SUNet login at https://hci.stanford.edu/cs147/studio/
To submit the assignment, log in to this website and click the Submit Assignment link in the Current Assignment box. On the submission page you can enter the writeup as well as upload any number of images. Clicking the "Save" button will save the current version of your writeup. Your latest save will automatically be submitted for grading when the assignment is due. You can save as many times as you need until the deadline.
Submit early! Late assignments will not be accepted!
Be prepared to informally present the needs you identified (3 minutes maximum). You should not prepare slides or other visuals for this presentation – we will have a projector set up that will allow you to easily present the digital photographs you submitted with your assignment.
At the end of this studio you will need to be in a group of 3. You can contact people ahead of time if you wish, or you can wait to form groups in studio. Read the course FAQ about forming a team. There are three areas of concentration within the group and you will be involved in all 3: design, development, and evaluation.
This assignment will be evaluated on the four dimensions listed below.
After your studio, log into the studio web site, and assess the quality of your assignment. Do so by selecting the cell that best describes your assignment for each of the four dimensions.
The TAs will provide a nuanced grading of your submission performed blind of your own rating, To give you a better idea of what cell your assignment belongs to there are two student examples for you to look at with the TA grading shown.
Grading Dimension |
Guiding questions |
Bare minimum |
Satisfactory
effort
& performance |
Above & Beyond |
| Authenticity (max 10 points) |
Was the observation conducted with actual users in an authentic setting? Is there a clear observation plan specified? Is there a clear justification for the chosen plan? | 1-6 points; Contrived task/setting with obvious plan that does not produce insightful observations | 7-8 points; Good attempt to create authentic task and plan | 9-10 points; Authentic user and task with well justified plan. |
| Diligence (max 20) |
Are there detailed observations of real behavior? Are the breakdowns and opportunities noted? | 1-13; Observations are obvious, contrived or vague | 14-17; Observations show an attempt to discover non-obvious behaviors | 18-20; Detailed, concrete observations that highlight breakdowns and suggest opportunities |
| Need synthesis (max 30) |
Are valuable insights derived form the observations? Were the observations synthesized into three or more distinct and meaningful needs? | 1-20; Simple summary of observations or conclusions poorly supported by observations | 21-26; Observations yield needs not previously obvious | 27-30; Needs demonstrate insights not possible before and are clearnly drawn from observations |
| Clarity (max 15) |
Are the findings organized and presented in clear written form? | 1-10; Findings summarized | 11-13; Summary highlights valuable points without wasting words | 14-15; Insights are the centerpieces that allow for zoom-in detail as appropriate |
| Student examples | Ex I | Ex II Ex III | Ex IV |