Bureaucrats, emailconfirmed
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In the beginning of your project your main activity will be doing user research and getting to know the goals and problems of your users. Later on you will probably solve more specific problems and use more books and online resources to solve these problems. | In the beginning of your project your main activity will be doing user research and getting to know the goals and problems of your users. Later on you will probably solve more specific problems and use more books and online resources to solve these problems. | ||
===Familiarize yourself with the domain=== | |||
You do research to get to know about activities, problems and motivations of people who will usually work in another field like you do (it is unlikely that you will do user research on other user researchers). The work of e.g. a statistical analyst demands specific terms (e.g. "significance tests") and has specific tools ("ANOVA"). | |||
It is a good idea to get an overview of the field before collecting data. It will not only help you to understand better what people are telling you, furthermore, you can set yourself more specific goals on what you want to find out and check, if your research idea makes sense (e.g. you could get the conclusion that what you actually want to find out might be better determined by sampling another group of people and not the one you first expected) | |||
This preliminary research should not prevent you from asking questions, even if you read what might be answered in a book. What the pre-research in books or wikipedia articles yields, is a idealized, often rather abstract description. It is good to know these ideas and procedures. However, they are often applied very differently in the real world and a term which is well defined in the book may mean something different to the people you work with. So you should ask if a term or a process is mentioned what it actually means. As a outsider this is o.k. (''they'' are experts in their field) – and often are happy to explain their practices regarding a term, problem or method. | |||
===User Goals/User Motivations=== | ===User Goals/User Motivations=== | ||