Hello and welcome back. Today, I will be introducing you to Course 2. This course is really focused on how to do user research and then how to take that user research and turn it into design ideas. There's roughly three parts to this course. The first focuses on conducting formative research with users. The second focuses on analyzing and communicating the results of that formative research. And lastly, the third part is by generating and selecting ideas based on this formative research. I'll just give a very brief overview of each of these parts. Research with users, here is a much younger me doing some user research with kids, trying to understand how they can use toys for learning. Basically, research with the users is going to focus on three different things, asking people questions, whether that is part of an interview, a contextual inquiry or something like a questionnaire. Observing people's behaviors, and again, this could be an unstructured observation in the wild, it could be a more structured observation in the lab, or something like contextual inquiry, where you both observe and ask questions. We're also going to talk a little about analyzing traces of people's behavior when you don't have direct access to their behaviors. Some examples may be something like logs of their activity on a website. As part of the course, we'll also have an assignment where we'll have you conduct observations and we'll provide you with some feedback on how you did. The second part of the course focuses on analyzing and communicating your results. This is actually an image from a real study. This is the analysis of quotes from interviews, where we clustered them into categories in order to understand what the meaning of those interviews was. In fact, we'll focus on three parts. Qualitative analysis, similar to what I showed in the last slide. Quantitative analysis when you have enough information that you can do things like descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing. And communication tools, how do you actually explain your findings to others? Especially, when working with teams where some people may not have been part of that direct formative research work. Some of the communication tools we'll cover will be personas, use cases, task scenarios, and implications for design. The last part of this course will focus on generating and selecting ideas. Again, this is a photo from a real study where we were looking at different ways of designing Interesting communication systems for families and so we had lots of different ideas sketched out to consider. Some of the things that will be involved in that part of the course are getting to a quantity of ideas, because that's how you get a good idea is you get a lot of ideas. Selecting the best quality ideas from those and communicating those ideas to stakeholders. Again, as part of this course, we'll have an assignment for you. We'll ask you to go from some user research that we provide you to some design ideas and provide you with feedback on your process. By the end of this course, you should be able to conduct a study to understand the technology opportunities in a particular context. You should be able to communicate your findings, the results of this study to others in a meaningful and clear way. And lastly, should be able to identify specific design directions that actually capitalize on these technology opportunities that you find through your formative work. I look forward to seeing you in this course.
