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:* What in particular do they aim for when they try to refind previously accessed pages. | :* What in particular do they aim for when they try to refind previously accessed pages. | ||
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==Interviews== | |||
A very useful tool for doing research are interviews. | |||
They are best done early in the design process in order to find out for which user needs you design, so this is finding out "Why". Interviews are not difficult to do, very versatile and you will get a lot of insight. | |||
You want to '''interview potential users of your product''', so you need to see who could use your product. Than you try to get these people to an interview. | You want to '''interview potential users of your product''', so you need to see who could use your product. Than you try to get these people to an interview. | ||
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These key findings will guide you when you create your designs, because you now know what you need to concentrate on. | These key findings will guide you when you create your designs, because you now know what you need to concentrate on. | ||
==Use what is already out there== | |||
Using existing resources is useful in later project stages when you need to solve specific problems and already know about your users goals. | |||
If the topic you want to work on is new for you it might be a good start to start with a book that offers an overview on the field of interest. It will help you as well to get to know the special terms that are used in a more specialized topic. This can be crucial: I often searched for papers of other resources on the web. What often took the most time was getting to know the name of what I was actually looking for. For a recent project on online collaboration in design I googled a lot about "Open Design", Collaborative Design" etc. finally I found out, that the term that gave me some interesting links was "open source design" – which was not what I would have guessed initially. | |||
This leads us to the very common possibility to use a search engine to find interesting sites on your topic. The UX community blogs a lot and there is a lot of stuff out there. | |||
In case you have a specific problem you can consider scientific papers. If you need an answer on questions like "what do people remember about their documents?" or "is bimanual interaction an advantage for navigating in virtural space?" than you should go for science! | |||
Reading papers may feel difficult when you start and often they contain graphs and numbers that tell you nothing at the first moment. But you will see that they all follow a common structure so after you got this you will easily find the parts that are of an interest for you - most likely the introduction telling what the paper is about and the conclusions about what they found out. | |||
What is especially cool about scientific papers is that the authors quote other authors findings and that the paper is again quoted by other researchers. So everything is connected – and once you found a paper that you like and find useful you get connections to all sorts of related papers. | |||
You can search for papers by using [http://www.google.com/scholar google scholar] or the [http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm ACM Library]. The search is free in both cases but just google scholar links sometimes directly to the papers while you need a membership for ACM. If your university has one, you are a lucky student! But even if you find a paper on ACM or google scholar links on a pricy database too you should give it a try and search specifically for that papers title. Often the researchers have published accessible versions on their webpages. | |||
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