Ex1: Ferry trip State of Art Analysis Mårten Norman

Introduction

We are studying a ferry ride between Slussen, Stockholm and Djurgården, Stockholm.
The trip is fairly short, about 15 minutes one-way. The ferry is a rather well integrated part of Stockholms public transport, but also a bit of a tourist attraction since it runs between "Gamla Stan" and Djurgården that are popular locations for visitors.

The team performed a combined observation field study and interview excursion by taking a ride with the boat and asking travellers questions according to the questionnary prepared in a previous blog post. Questions were both for:

•  Qualitative analysis to get empirical data and aquire a better understanding of context of use and also get hints of Use Cases and expectations around the trip.
• Quantitative analysis with rating scales on the limited set of questions we could categorize exact answers for in advance.

Interviews of Ferry Riders

We did a  task analysis by interviewing ferry riders and a few potential ferry riders about the intended purpose or goal of the ride. Most of the respondants were either going to work or touristing in a location nearby the ferry landing. They had to wait maximum 15 minutes for the ferry, the ride was about seven minutes one-way. There were both seats inside and viewplaces outside.

Most of the travelers said they were happy with the boat trip. This was also confirmed by simple triangulation -- we observed most people at the boat looking happy and acting relaxed. Both for frequent commuting  and for a single tourist ride. This might be explained easily though. The boat offers a competitive alternative to buses and trams that has to follow a crowded road instead of going straight over the water. And the sea view comes for free while the ride is short enough to compete with the equivalent bus ride.

Technical State of the Art and Expected Future

Ferrys

All ferrys has restrooms and all had some or even good support for wheelchairs, bikes and goods transport. According to the ferry operator's web page, the fleet consist of both old and new boats, where new boats has better accessability.

The combination of old and new boats suggest that a ferry has very long operational life-time. Hence it is fair to assume that a ferrys basic properties will remain similar for decades exept for refurbishing and add-on installations.

Ecosystem state of art

Traffic System

Public transport in Stockholm is operated by SL, Stockholms Lokaltrafik which employ subcontractors for the actual bus, train, subway and boat operations. To the average rider though, SL looks like a seamless single operator with a central ticket system and customer service.

APIs and apps

The SL traffic information data base and servers (like timetables, real-time delays, travel planner) are available over a public API. SL has an official web page and app, but there are also a large number of 3:rd party apps available of verying quality. This might be a cultural probe of the intersection of Open Data and Apps. Everybody can in theory make an SL app, and a few of those who really can has done it and published the result.

One conclusion is that we must think twice before designing yet another app.

Personal Technology

Based on indirect observations and empirical data of technical products and their evolution.

Most people have a phone. A lot of people has a phone or similar device with ability to run apps and access internet. Some people wears headphones, mainly for music but sometimes also for talking over the phone.

Apps has existed since 2008, but the concept (programs installed by users) has existed for more than 50 years. Conclusion: The App concept is not stable yet. There will be further change.

The Siri App is one of the first Virtual Assistant products launched by Apple 2011. It offers a voice interacting artificial intelligence that can respond to a limited set of instructions. Typical examples are setting an alarm, getting a weather report or dictate an SMS. The current Siri is stupid, but useful for a person who learned to stay within Siri's abilities.

Watson is a Question Answering AI system by IBM. It is able to read massive amounts of text and provide answers based on the text, including refering to the text and explain how the answer relates to the text material. In a marketing event by IBM in 2011, Watson played Jeopardy! against the best human players and won. Right now it is learning to read medical records and law text.

What if Siri and Watson merges? Can they read timetables and tourist guides from an unknown city and act as a personal guide?


Background data here.

ex.1 State of the art analysis Vincent Wong

In stockholm there are several ways to transport between Slussen and Djurgården. One way and probably the most notable one is to take the ferry trip, which departures every quarter from each station. There are other transportation methods but none as efficient and time effective. The buss route or what not results in double the translation time, if not more, compared to the ferry. The ferry is also seen as a tourist attraction, where tourist has the chance to see stockholm from a different perspective, something the buss can not offer.

In the link below there is an interesting technical interview, which could be useful if used as an indicator of the density on the boat. As of now there aint no such thing.
https://www.kth.se/aktuellt/nyheter/trangseln-i-tunnelbanan-kan-atgardas-1.587402

From my own observations and interviews another problem is that regular commuters such as me or tourist does not know where the boat will stop, whether it will stop in Skeppsholmen is usually a big confuse.

In the Slussen harbour this is the most notable information board, but it doesn't tell you anything about the route the boat is taking, it's all about buying tickets and boarding the boat. Which is totally wrong, from a human interaction point of view, as this is the most notable sign, apart of ticket purchase it should also consist of other useful facts, such as time table and the route.

And last but not least, the devices where you can buy ticket is actually directly under the sun-ray during summer times, which is a bad solution since you barely see anything.

State of the Art Background Links

Djurgårdsfärjan
Use this link (to Waxholmsbolaget). There is another link circulating for Sjövägen, but that is another operator who starts from Nybroplan rather than Slussen that is our scope. Both are cooperating with SL though.

Some key features from the www page:

• 2.2 million travellers/year
• Possible to get around the boats in wheelchair, exact conditions depends on each boat but some documentation here http://www.waxholmsbolaget.se/resa/fartygen/tillganglighet-ombord/
• They have web cameras to give hints about the weather at their ports http://www.waxholmsbolaget.se/webbkameror/

Apps (no quality check, just listing)

• Waxholmsbolagets app. Info on Timetables and Ticket prices. Apparently no interaction. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waxholmsbolaget
•  SLs app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sl.SLBiljetter  Focus on buying single ride tickets in the app, but also maps and travel planner.
•  Reads the SL ticket with NFC equipped phones (apparantly SL:s card are legacy and not supported by all modern NFC phones) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.supertips.android.ressaldo
• 
  
• Several 3:rd party travel planners using SL:s open API, small and big actors
•  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.markupartist.sthlmtraveling
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gullesnuffs.busskollen 
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nobina.resistockholm.resistockholm
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vgsoftware.android.realtime 
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apptastic.stockholmcommute 

Misc

•  List of public available APIs https://www.trafiklab.se/api.(to the servers behind SL:s own travel planner, traffic info at stations etc -- thus likely to offer similar raw data quality level as SL has for their own information to commuters. For good and for bad.) Timteables, real-time. Bus stop locations for SL. Real-time delay info, travel planner.

MIT projects that may be relevant (link from Eva Sjuve DH2620 notification about sources) https://www.media.mit.edu/research/groups-projects

 

Automatic Stress Recognition in Real-Life Settings

Special Interest group(s):  Advancing Wellbeing

Rosalind W. Picard, Robert Randall Morris and Javier Hernandez Rivera
Technologies to automatically recognize stress are extremely important to prevent chronic psychological stress and pathophysiological risks associated with it. The introduction of comfortable and wearable biosensors has created new opportunities to measure stress in real-life environments, but there is often great variability in how people experience stress and how they express it physiologically. In this project, we modify the loss function of Support Vector Machines to encode a person's tendency to feel more or less stressed, and give more importance to the training samples of the most similar subjects. These changes are validated in a case study where skin conductance was monitored in nine call center employees during one week of their regular work. Employees working in this type of setting usually handle high volumes of calls every day, and they frequently interact with angry and frustrated customers that lead to high stress levels.

view site

 

Building the Just-Right-Challenge in Games and Toys

Rosalind W. Picard and Elliott Hedman
Working with the LEGO Group and Hasbro, we looked at the emotional experience of playing with games and LEGO bricks. We measured participants' skin conductance as they learned to play with these new toys. By marking the stressful moments we were able to see what moments in learning should be redesigned. Our findings suggest that framing is key: how can we help children recognize their achievements? We also saw how children are excited to take on new responsibilities but are then quickly discouraged when they aren't given the resources to succeed. Our hope for this work is that by using skin conductance sensors, we can help companies better understand the unique perspective of children and build experiences fit for them.

view site

 

Emotion Prototyping: Redesigning the Customer Experience

Rosalind W. Picard and Elliott Hedman
You can test whether a website is usable by making wire frames, but how do you know if that site, product, or store is emotionally engaging? We build quick, iterative environments where emotions can be tested and improved. Emphasis is on setting up the right motivation (users always have to buy what they pick), pressures (can you buy the laptop in 10 minutes?), and environment (competitors’ products better be on the shelf too). Once we see where customers are stressed or miss the fun part, we change the space on a daily, iterative cycle. Within two to three weeks, we can tell how to structure a new offering for a great experience. Seldom do the emotions we hope to create happen on the first try; emotion prototyping delivers the experience we want. We hope to better understand the benefits of emotion prototyping, especially while using the skin conductance sensor.

view site

 

The People's Bot

Ethan Zuckerman, J. Nathan Matias, Chelsea Barabas
Telepresent robots are often pitched as a technology to extend the influence of those who already have money and power. We want to use robotic telepresence for the public good–broadening access, supporting public interest reporting, and funding access initiatives.

view site

 

EyeRing: A Compact, Intelligent Vision System on a Ring

Roy Shilkrot and Suranga Nanayakkara
EyeRing is a wearable, intuitive interface that allows a person to point at an object to see or hear more information about it. We came up with the idea of a micro-camera worn as a ring on the index finger with a button on the side, which can be pushed with the thumb to take a picture or a video that is then sent wirelessly to a mobile phone to be analyzed. The user tells the system what information they are interested in and receives the answer in either auditory or visual form. The device also provides some simple haptic feedback. This finger-worn configuration of sensors and actuators opens up a myriad of possible applications for the visually impaired as well as for sighted people.

view site 

TagMe

Pattie Maes, Judith Amores Fernandez and Xavier Benavides Palos
TagMe is an end-user toolkit for easy creation of responsive objects and environments. It consists of a wearable device that recognizes the object or surface the user is touching. The user can make everyday objects come to life through the use of RFID tag stickers, which are read by an RFID bracelet whenever the user touches the object. We present a novel approach to create simple and customizable rules based on emotional attachment to objects and social interactions of people. Using this simple technology, the user can extend their application interfaces to include physical objects and surfaces into their personal environment, allowing people to communicate through everyday objects in very low-effort ways.


view site

Inducing Peer Pressure to Promote Cooperation

Erez Shmueli, Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, Dhaval Adjodah and David Shrier
Cooperation in a large society of self-interested individuals is notoriously difficult to achieve when the externality of one individual's action is spread thin and wide. This leads to the "tragedy of the commons," with rational action ultimately making everyone worse off. Traditional policies to promote cooperation involve Pigouvian taxation or subsidies that make individuals internalize the externality they incur. We introduce a new approach to achieving global cooperation by localizing externalities to one's peers in a social network, thus leveraging the power of peer pressure to regulate behavior. The mechanism relies on a joint model of externalities and peer-pressure. Surprisingly, this mechanism can require a lower budget to operate than the Pigouvian mechanism, even when accounting for the social cost of peer pressure. Even when the available budget is very low, the social mechanisms achieve greater improvement in the outcome.
 

Summary of interview (Group)

After interviewing the passengers on the ferry between Slussen and Djurgården we received enough data to come to a conclusion. By observing their faces everyone looked pretty happy, those we asked to interview happily participated. We can divide the passengers into three different subgroups, tourist, workers and others.

Tourist
Most of the tourist found information about this ferry trip via tourist information, map or hotel reception. They all enjoyed the view and thought it was fairly simple to purchase tickets. The tourist we asked either got the 72 h pass or 24 h pass through SL, which they thought as convenient since you could travel as much as you can during the time period. They didn't mind the waiting time and thought the ferry departure quite frequently.

Workers

the workers of Skeppsholmen or Djurgården thought the ferry line were the most convenient way to travel between Djurgården and Slussen, time and economy wise. But they didn't like the way the boat traveled depending on different seasons, in particularly the workers from Skeppsholmen. It seems that during the summer, the ferry only travels to Skeppsholmen like once each hour.

Others(those who travel this line few times each month)

As the workers they thought of this a the most convenient method. 

As of what the passengers does on the trip, most of them usually uses their phones or talk to their friend and colleges. while on the other hand the tourist usually take pictures.

Interview responses, Marcus and Martin

We took the ferry around 17:00 and took notes.

Question.
How often do you ride the ferry?

Answer
- Every day. (Workers)
-Sometimes.

Question.
Why do you ride the ferry?

Answer.
- It's more relaxing.
- The ferry travels more frequently.
- It's more fun and nicer.
- Simplest/fastest way to get to work.

Question.
Are there anyting to improve about the ferry?

Answer.
- The frequency.
- Trash cans.

Question.
Which season  do you prefer to ride the ferry?

Answer.
- The winter, becasue the ferry travels more frequantly.
- Summer, Beacaue of the nice weather.

Interview responses, Vincenet & Staffan

The interviews took place on the boat at 17:00. We used the technique where one asked the questions and the other took notes with pen and paper. Triangulation was also kept in mind when we interviewed people going from A to B and B to A.

Non frequent user

Why travel with the ferry?
-Fast & smooth

What drawbacks are there?
-No information on when the first boat leaves

How do you spend time during the ride?
-Surfing on my mobile phone

How did you learn that you can travel this trip by boat?
-Always known

How often do you use this service?
-Once a month

How was it getting the ticket? easy/hard
-Easy, I use "reskassa" from the ticket machine

Did you enjoy the ride?
-Yes

 Is the boat frequency good enough?
-Yes


Frequent user

Why travel with the ferry?
-Get to work, fastest way and it's nice

What drawbacks are there?
-In the summer they change the route so then I use the buss because it's faster
-Last departure to early (20:00), would be nice to take the boat home after dinner at a restaurant.
 
How do you spend time during the ride?
-Surfing on my mobile phone and listening to music

How did you learn that you can travel this trip by boat?
-Always known

How often do you use this service?
-Every day

How was it getting the ticket? easy/hard
-Easy, I have a monthly ticket

Did you enjoy the ride?
-Yes

 Is the boat frequency good enough?
-Yes, but it wouldn't hurt if it was a bit more frequent.


Group of three tourists

Why travel with the ferry?
-Reach the museums at Djurgården

What drawbacks are there?
-Can't see where the next stop will be, Skeppsholmen or Allmänna Gränd.
 
How do you spend time during the ride?
-Looking at the view and talking to each other

How did you learn that you can travel this trip by boat?
-Tourist map with all the buss, boat and train routes

How often do you use this service?
-First time today

How was it getting the ticket? easy/hard
-Easy, asked at our hotel and bought 72 hour tickets at Pressbyrån

Did you enjoy the ride?
-Yes

 Is the boat frequency good enough?
-Yes


Two tourists

Why travel with the ferry?
-Reach the museums at Djurgården

What drawbacks are there?
-Can't see where the next stop will be, would be nice to see the exact route
 
How do you spend time during the ride?
-Looking at the view, map and talking to each other

How did you learn that you can travel this trip by boat?
-Tourist map with all the buss, boat and train routes

How often do you use this service?
-First time today

How was it getting the ticket? easy/hard
-Easy, 24 hour tickets at Pressbyrån (probably got the info from their hotel)

Did you enjoy the ride?
-Yes

 Is the boat frequency good enough?
-Yes

Interview responses Mårten Norman

Respondents not interviewed on the ferry to get input from potential riders.


Qualitative (aggregate of 3 responses):


1. Why travel with the ferry? (Other fairly realistic options are bus, tram and walking).

• More fun
• Faster
• Cosier
• Buses are filthy
• Boats has restrooms (unconfirmed if this particular boat has restrooms) 

2 .What drawbacks are there? Anything that can be improved?

•  Too many other boats around

3. How do you spend the time waiting for the next boat?

• Surfing (mobile)
• Too short waiting to be relevant
• Talking with the rest of the party friends/family

4. How do you spend time during the ride?

• Surfing (mobile)
• Walk around the boat (outdoors)

5. How did you learn that you can travel this trip by boat?

• Just knew
• Faint memory of doing a ride several years ago
• Mother works nearby

6. What is your favorite season to go boat riding? Why?

• Summer

Quantitative:

1. How often do you ride? daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/first time

• Few times a year
• Several years between rides
• Never

2. How was it getting the ticket? 1 hard, 5 easy

• Did not buy the ticket
• No memory of the experience
• -

3. Did you enjoy the ride? 1 yes, 2 no, 3 dont know.

• Yes
• Yes
• -

4. Is the boat frequency good enought?

• Yes
• Yes
• Yes

Original transcript:

It may look messy, but I can read it -- at least if I have the discipline to enter the information in a clean format in reasonable time as I did here. Maybe a case related to the recall from pattern where medical doctor's recalled massive amounts of patient data from a glimpse of their journal record in spite of having all characters replaced by 'X':s to remove all textual meaning of the documents. (E. Nygren , "The art of the obvious", 1992; referred to by Guliksen in the MDI15  cognition lecture).

Ex1: Interview questions for ferry travelers

Format should support quick interviews since we expect several respondents to be in a hurry and we do not want to fail getting at least some input from them. So we decided to use structured interviewes to avoid longer conversations and be able to gather more data.

Qualitative:

1. Why travel with the ferry? (Other fairly realistic options are bus, tram and walking).
2. What drawbacks are there? Anything that can be improved?
3. How do you spend the time waiting for the next boat?
4. How do you spend time during the ride?
5. How did you learn that you can travel this trip by boat?
6. What is your favorite season to go boat riding? Why?

Quantitative:

1. How often do you ride? daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/first time 
2. How was it getting the ticket? 1 hard, 5 easy
3. Did you enjoy the ride? 1 yes, 2 no, 3 dont know.
4. Is the boat frequency good enought?

Notes for seminar 1, Mårten Norman

Reflections on ch7 Data gathering

Dividing the work process in the steps Data, Information and Conclusion looks like a good description structure. Especially when communicating to an non-initialized audience. The chain of activities are visible signs of a planned structure and there is a promise of a result that may improve something.

Design of questionaries is a science in itself. I feel rather familiar with the topics. Still it is obvious that I should make a draft and ask for guidance to avoid mistakes.

Stopping observation and consider it ready when you start recognizing patterns appear like a good rule of thumb for me. This reminds a bit of my learning strategy where I move on when things make sense. On the other hand it's easy to get stuck when things do not make sense. Maybe this can happen with observations too; when there is no obvious pattern to recognize within a realistic timeframe.

 

Reflections on ch8, Data analysis.

Quantitative data vs qualitative data is still a bit confusing to me. I struggle to find an intuitive and still correct definition better than quanitative = "lots of numbers" and qualitative = "a few informal essays".

The outspoken acceptance of Convencience sampling is good. Not since it is good to "take those you find" rather than taking random samples, but it is good to admit reality and deal with it in a realistic and scientific way.

Reflections on ch10, Identifying needs, Establishing requirements. 

Requirements reflects a goal and are related to a persona or user characteristic or activity. Higher level requirements should be broken down into more detailed requirements. Class diagrams and sequence diagrams may be required too before actual HW and SW design may start.


Questions:

• Good intuition for better separation of quantiative vs qualitiative? They are very different, but exactly how?
• Ethics for extracting information from server logs and other semi-anonymous data that is easy to access in quantity? Are there any gray zones or even acceptable ways to use this without consent from the users?

Notes for seminar 1, Marcus Tjellander

Chapter 7 contained for most part how you collect data from different method. But more in detail how to do interviews, gather data and observing. The method itself helps to manage gathering data. Different kinds of questions and observation styles also help you planning of data gathering more easy and simple. If we start with interview, it was important that good relationship and goals were clear from the start. Making it more comfortably for the target. Collecting data had a number of ways to gather. You could film or audio record it or take notes, but a combination of the three would be best in my opinion. Another way to collect your data is through questions or survey. The advantage of survey is that it is time efficient and easy while question is more personally and easy to tweak the words.  Both should be used in case of you met a person with handicap.

In chapter 8 they talk about quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitative date is often data in form of numbers that can easily be translated into numbers. Example time or numbers of attending this event. Qualitative data is more suited for data from image or interview.

Last in chapter 10 the main aim is to describe different kind of requirements. What, how and why you do it the way you do and how you analysis your data.

Question: should you divide young from adult or use a specific age interval when you chose your target group?   

Notes for seminar 1, Vincent Wong

In interaction design there are three main methods of data gathering: interviews, questionnaires and observation.

1. Interviews: As the name suggest, an interview where the purpose is to ask a series of question to collect data. There are mainly four types of interviews: open-ended or unstructered, structured, semi-structured and group interviews, but we are not going in depth of these four methods now.

2. Questionnaires: Just like interviews a questionnaires purpose is to ask a series of question to colllect data for improvment of for example a problem. However unlike interviews, questionnaires is usually distributed to a larger number of participants since it does not requiere the participant to be at a specific location and time.This is due to the fact that questionnaires are mainly in a digital form, where the participants answers through computer/tablet or cellphone.

3. Observations: A very efficient method of collecting data, since the designers observes the users interacting with what should be improved.

Apart from these three methods of gathering data there is also five key issuses(We will go through them briefly below) to be considered: Goal setting, identifying participants, relationship with participant, triangulation and pilot studies.
1. Setting goals: what is the goal of this research?
2. Identifying participants: Once a clear goal is set, the indentifying of participants should fall through.
3.relationship with participants: Make sure the relationship between the participants is professional, one way of doing this could be to ask the participant to sign some sort of paper.
4.Triangulation: To put it simple, triangulation is basically a method where the data is drawn from different sources at different times, places or from different people.
5. Pilot studies: Pilot study is a small trial run of the main study, to ensure the viability of the method before the real study.

And of course these methods are all useless without the proper way of recording data: video, sound, notes and pictures. These four methods could also be combined and form another type of dimension.

So there is really no wrong or right way of carrying out data gathering, the method used should always be considered and appropriate depending on the situation and environment for example. Some information may not be of use in the same extent as other informations, which brings us to chapter eight were the processing of data gathered matters. This chapter describes different ways of analyzing data gathered, the result is either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative data analysis is data that is not expressed in numbers, but more in a formal way, such as quotes and pictures. Whereas quantitative data is information converted into digits and presented as graphs. Much like data gathering both method of data analysis has their pros and cons.

 As for chapter ten, the chapter talks about the reason behind the studies. Why are we doing it? What is the motive/reasons behind it? What is the context of use? Well, obviously the main reason why we as people always does studies is mainly to improve or create.

Question
How and when do you know that a studies of human computer interaction is needed if the product/service is already good and easy to understand?

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?

Notes for Seminar 1, Rasmus Ansin

Needs and requirements:

In software engineering, two different kinds of requirements have traditionally been identified: functional requirements, which say what the system should do, and non-functional requirements, which say what constraints there are on the system and its development. In short, functional requirements capture what the product should do, data requirements capture the type, volatility, size/amount, persistence, accuracy, and the value of the amount of the required data.

Aspects of environment: physical environment (protection against physical harm, light requirements), social environment (collaboration, what needs to be shared?), organizational environment (how easily can user support be obtained?) and the technical environment (compatibilities, limitations?).

Data gathering:

Different techniques of data gathering:

Questionnaires, interviews, naturalistic observation, documentation study.

Questionnaires: good at getting specific questions answered frmo a large group of people. Response rates might be low and the responses might not be of the type you would like them to be, though.

Interviews makes the user feel more involved, but are time consuming and might feel artificial.

Naturalistic observation is very time-consuming but is a good way of understanding a broader context.

Documentation study: good for getting background, but documented working may differ from day-to-day working.

Use a combination of techniques, and make sure to cover many different types of users.

Scenarios and cases: combine them to form essential use cases.

Task analysis:

hierarchical task analysis: break down the tasks into subtasks, which are then broken down inte sub-subtasks and so on. Then group them together as a plan that specify how the task might be performed in an actual situation. E.g.

0. In order to borrow a book from the library

1. go to the library

2. fnd the required book

2.1 access library catalog

2.2 access the search screen

2.3 enter search criteria

2.4 identify required book

2.5 note location

3. go to correct shelf and retrieve book

4. take book to checkout counter

plan 0: do 1-3-4. If book isn't on the shelf expected, do 2-3-4.

plan 2: do 2.1 -2.4-2.5. If book not identified do 2.2-2.3-2.4-2.5.

Consider showing plans in graphical form as well. It is hard to model complex tasks and multiple tasks interacting and running parallel.

Question: How do you figure out the most effective way of gathering data, as in what type of data gathering gives you the most and best information?

Notes For Seminar 1, Staffan Sandberg

Chapter 7 is about data gathering. It says that you should pay attention to five different key issuses to be successful, which are ”setting goals, identefying participants, relationship between the data collector and the data provider, triangulation and pilot studies”.

Triangulation was the issue that i thought the most about. I’ve heard of triangulation before but not in this context. In the book they mention four types of triangulations, I focused on the first mentioned which says. ” Triangulation of data, data is drawn from different sources at different times in different places”. How can this be applied to our project? Interviewing people whom are traveling from point A to B and those traveling from B to A etc. Questionnaries could be used aswell.

Question: How will the data differ depending on the time of the day?

Pilot studies seems like a great thing to start early on. After the project has been chosen we can develop questions for interviews or questioneers, and continuously develop and improve them. I think this is great so we can spot flaws early on and be prepeared for the field studies.

In chapter 8 they go through how to analyze the data that has been gathered. There are two types of data that can be recieved, qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative data can be translated in to numbers and be anayzed with statistics. Qualitative data is descriptions, quotes and images etc, which might not be so useful in the form of numbers. When analyzing qualitative data we have to look for recurring patterns. Here we have to keep in mind what is qualitative and what is quantitative, so they can be seperatet and analysed in the right way.

Chapter 10 is about establishing requirements. The first step is to find out what we are doing and why. If we are changing an existing system and why etc. By knowing this we can develop functional/non-functional requirements etc. One way of doing this is to create use cases for different people with different needs, on how they go throug the process of buying a ticket or finding the correct route. Withouth propper requirements our final product might not result in what we had in mind from the first place.

Questions seminar 1

• For certain situations, which way is the best to gather information, quantitative or qualitative?
• How do you value your information? Should some respondents be weighted up or down considering their fitness for the scope and/or thrustwortness?
• How much and what information can we gather from data lagos without peoples consent? Web servers and mail servers has logs that are available and and least in theory easy to make anonymous. But it might be a grayzone?
• When constructing personas, is there a risk to be too specific? The design might be too specialized for an invented individual

Group D3, Djurgårdsfärjan

From left to right: Mårten, Vincent, Marcus, Martin, Staffan