torsdag 10 september 2015

Notes for first seminar, Martin

The contents of ch. 7 was about data gathering in different form, like interviews,  questionaires and observations.
The first part states the five key issues of gathering data. The first of these were setting goals which I think is the most important one, because without a goal there is no meaning of the data gathering. It is also important to be able to specify what you goals are for the interviewie if they ask, otherwise they probably won't participate in the interview. Another of these key issues were triangulation.

Triangulation appears in four different forms as stated in the book. To summarize these different types I would say that triangulation is when you gather data with variations in the surroundings meaning that we don't gather all the data at the same time or in the same place and use different techniques of gathering information. In our case it is difficult to gather information from people travelling the boat without going to the boat and asking people there since travelling with the boat here in Stockholm is less common than travelling with other local trasportations. But what we could do is to go to the boat at different times and see how the responses vary.

In addition to using interview as the source for information you can use questionnaires. This is a good way of gathering information because it gives the target more time to think about the answers before answering. I would say it also takes away alot of pressure from the participant and it is not as personal as an interview. For our project we could use questionnaires to gather more quantitative data from people on the boat.

Ch. 8 describes the ways to analys the data that you have gathered and also how to interpretate and present what you have found. It also brings up the concept of qualitative and quantitative data gathering.

Qualitative data gathering is when you go more in to depth with the questions you are asking. For example asking open-ended questions, which are questions that don't just have a couple of alternatives like "yes or no" or "a ranking scale" (from 1 to 10 possibly).

Quantitative data gathering is when the answers to the questions are short and simple which is the opposite to qualitative answers. This is good if you want to get more statistical data that has alot of participants involved in it. In our case this could be questions like "How often do you travel with the boat?" where there are pre-selected answers like "every day", "once a week", "once a month" and "less than once a month".

Presenting the data in the right way is also an important part. There are three main parts in presenting the gathered data. These are rigorous notations, using stories and summarizing the findings. Rigorous notations is when you present the data with highlights on the most important things. By using stories you can either replicate a story told by the participant or if they haven't told any stories make up a story about the information they have told you. I think this could be a good way for us to present the data in our project because a story could easily tell what is going on in the travellers mind. Besides, who doesn't like to read a good story? To summarize the findings could be a good way to give the information in a clear way to the reader.

Ch. 10 is about establishing requirements. Establishing requirements is very important to do before begining a project, otherwise the result probably won't be the same as it was intended to be. I thought that the pictures on page 352 describing what could happen if requirements aren't established correctly was a good example of this. Requirements could be all sort of things, for example a computer needs to be fast enought so that the user doesn't get impatient and throws it out the window. The design of a final product is also an important requirement but this is a requirement based on the users opinion where as the computer speed is a more general requirement, because who wants a slow computer?

Question: How is the best way to set requirements so that everyone involved in the project understands what goals are intended?



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