IFD:Course Interaction Design: Difference between revisions

It is important to get to know what your users what to achieve – what their goals are. User goals  are not activities - like using a feature in your product.

What the goals of your users are is best to find out using research methods like interviews. Goals are hard to guess. You may not even always aware of why exactly ''you'' do something - and it is even harder to tell what drives other people. Especially if you are new to a field you should use research but even people who think they are experts are often wrong about the users goals. Don't try to guess harder. You want to know.

As designers is that we love to focus on coming things. Here we need to look at the current situation and the way the user does things now in order to find out the goals behind actions and to discover existing problems because they reveal a lot about the way users think as well as good starting points for improvements.

Take some time to do the review and gather all you notes or recordings. Read or listen through them. Remember, we want to find out about user goals and existing problems. Write what you consider as important down. Now you should get an overview by grouping the findings. Some will occur more often or add up to a kind of problem field.  

Your coming design work will be based on your research findings. As they are very important because of that, you should write them down. This is especially important if you work in a team - it helps to stay focused and eases communication.

You can write down your '''original project idea''' first, as well as you target group. Describe your potential users as clear as possible.  Than write down what you want to do. This will be supporting the '''user goals''' you found out via your research. During the interviews you researched as well '''problems''' of the users. Being aware about problems will help you not to repeat errors and reveals a lot about the way the user deal with current technology. Making these errors is something you want to avoid to do. You should write down as well what could distract you in the design process. This is often rebuilding existing products that appear to have a similar focus or including functions that are often suggested but don't support your actual product vision.   

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.