Week 3

Our lecture this week was on User Centric Design: Requirement analysis.

So what is user centric design?
User centric design is a method used for iterative design. The method looks like this;

























The three steps include;
1. Design
2. Implement
3. Evaluate.

This method is quite expensive, so to save time and cost it is better to follow a spiral model.

These steps also include;
1. Design
2. Implement
3. Evaluate
But there is also extra information added to this model than what there is for the iterative model.

So where do we start?
Requirement gathering has three main steps; design, implementation and evaluation.
In the requirement gathering phase there is 3 main primary activities and they are;

• User observation
• Interviewing and
• Task analysis.

User observation is when you target the users. As soon as you find the target audience you can address them and observe their behaviours. 

Interviews will give you the insight into behaviours you have observed earlier. It provides insight into identity goals that users are trying to achieve through their actions.

Task analysis helps understand in detail how users perform their tasks and achieve their goals. Task analysis helps identify the task that your product must support. 

• What are their goals?
• How do they achieve their goals?
• What experiences users bring to the tasks.

Than we move onto task behaviour analysis.

Task behaviour analysis is how the users are influenced by their physical environment. 

The lecture was finished with our homework for the week. Our homework for this week was;

Go through project 1 brief "Improving university learning experience" and identify your primary user group.

Observe target user group to find issues that need attention and can be addressed with help of technology.

Make sure by addressing the identified issuers you are improving quality of university learning for the target user group.

Develop 3 ideas that cold address identified issues.

Make a short pitch for your ideas and bring them to the tutorial next week. 

The primary target group I have chosen to study is first year university students who live on campus. 

When observing the 1st year university student who live on campus group, I noticed that one major problem they all face is time management between socialising and studies. Most students I observed leave all their assessments and homework to the last minute, because they would rather spend their night socialising with friends and having a night out. Time management is an important thing in life and first year students seem to be having trouble with this. 

The idea that I had that could address the time management of first year university students who live on campus is an app for mobile users. This app will include features that encourage university students to do their studies and assignments before they socialise. It will give points when submitting an assignment and the point can be added up to get something for free. 

This homework made me think outside the box and was a challenging experience. The problem I identified was probably the easiest part but trying to think of an application for mobile users that will help with time management between studies and socialising became a struggle. I came up with the idea, and tested it out with the target group. The target group gave me feedback on if it would work and if it wouldn't work and gave me ideas on how I could fix it and improve it. Im currently happy with the app I have put forward and hopefully I can only improve it with the weeks to come. 

Bibliography

Gudur, Raghavendra. (2015). 9291 User interface and experience. Lecture 2, week 3: User centric design: Requirement gathering [Powerpoint slides]

Lawton, H., Thorp, J. (2008). User centric design process. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/WAI/redesign/ucd