Reading seminar 1 - Rebecka Rönnbäck

For the first seminar we’ve read three articles and some chapters from a book called Designing for Interaction.  They have all been about usability and design between the producer and the user, but in different ways. To begin with there are four ways of designing.

The first is called User-Centered Design (USD). This way of designing assumes that the user knows best and therefore the design is adjusted for the user’s needs. The process of designing is interacted with potential users and their input on how it should be.

The second is called Activity Centered Design, and is based, as you can hear from the name, on activities, behaviors around certain tasks.

The third is called System Design and is a structured design for big and complex problems.

Last but not least, Genius Design. The designer makes all the choices on how the product will end up by knowing the users need. It is not like in the USD though, where the user actually get to decide on looks.

The texts also discuss how to gather information and say that qualitative research is to prefer rather than quantitative research. So what is the difference?

Qualitative research is based on interviews and opinions, on behaviors and expectations, questions beginning with why and how, instead of quantitative which is collected data and statistics.

For our project, I believe we will use a mix of the first and the fourth designing technique. We will get a picture of our target groups and our users and what they want and need, and work from that. For this, we will use qualitative research.

My question for this seminar is:
How do we continue the research after the first interview when we have found the target group? Is it a good idea to stay in touch (using the USD method) or bring new people in if we want to make more research?