The aim of this assignment is for you to practice data gathering. Assume that you have been employed to improve an interactive product such as a smartphone app, an iPod, a DVD recorder, computer software, a photocopying machine, or some other type of technology that interests you. You may either redesign this product, or create a completely new product.

For this assignment you need to answer the following questions:

1. Clarify the basic goal of improving the product by considering what this means in your circumstances.
2. Explain how you would use each of the three data gathering techniques: interview, questionnaire, and observation in your data gathering program. Explain how your plan takes account of triangulation.
3. Decide what kind of interview you want to run, and design an include in your answer a set of interview questions for your study.
4. Explain how you will record the data. Decide whether you want to use direct or indirect observation and where on the outsiderinsider spectrum of observers you wish to be

2.

The data in the table below represents the time taken for a group of users to select and buy an item from an online shopping website. Using a spreadsheet application to which you have access, generate a bar graph and a scatter diagram to give you an overall view of the data. From this representation, make two initial observations about the data that might form the basis of further investigation.

User A B. C D E F G. H. I. J K L M. N O P Q. R. S

Time 15 10 12. 10 14 13 11 18 14 17 20 15 18 24 12 16 18 20 26

3.

The following is another think-aloud extract from the same study. Using the categorization scheme code this extract for usability problems. It is useful to put brackets around the complete element of the extract that you are coding.

Well, looking at the map, again there's no obvious start point, there should be something highlighted that says start here.

Ok, the next keyword that's highlighted is evaluating, but I'm not sure that's where I want to go straight away, so I'm just going to go back to the introduction.

Yeah, so I probably want to read about usability problems before I start looking at evaluation. So, I, yeah. I would have thought that the links in each one of the pages would take you to the next logical point, but my logic might be different to other people's. Just going to go and have a look at usability problems.

Ok, again I'm going to flip back to the introduction. I'm just thinking if I was going to do this myself I would still have a link back to the introduction, but I would take people through the logical sequence of each one of these bits that fans out, rather than expecting them to go back all the time.

Going back . . . to the introduction. Look at the types. Observation, didn't really want to go there. What's this bit [pointing to Types of UE on map]? Going straight to types of . . .

Ok, right, yeah, I've already been there before. We've already looked at usability problems, yep that's ok, so we'll have a look at these references.

I clicked on the map rather than going back via introduction, to be honest I get fed up going back to introduction all the time.