IFD:HumanCenteredDesignResearch SoSe13/team2

User Research

Research we did

Specifiy the research you did: Participant selection/target group, style of data-gathering (observation, asking questions, focus group etc.)

During the course Human Centered Design we conducted an exploratory user study to find out about the acquaintance of Creative Commons, potential pitfalls and caveats of its usage. Our probands where selected from students of the Bauhaus University Weimar from courses of studies ranging from Media Arts & Design over Visual Communication to Product Design aged between 20 - 28 years. All of them were selected for their unawareness of local copyright jurisdiction and licensing models (e.g. CC). The short interviews took place in their personal environment during the activity of publishing original content on their personal (micro)blogging platforms. In advance our group defined the basic premise of identifying the users motivation of publishing their works in the web. After each interview we presented the participants with the concept of Creative Commons and introduced them to the website and the function of choosing their own fitting license.

One participant gladly allowed us to publish the complete interview which you can download here: (German language)

(Participant #3, "Emily"):

Example assessment of an interview

• Part 1 Media:interview-p3-part1.mp3
• Part 2 Media:interview-p3-part2.mp3

Each interview has then been assessed by our group to identify the following problems, motivations and activities.

Problems we identified

One of the major problems we identified was inherent to our target group selection, which is the unawareness of Creative Commons. Most users did not know the full dimension of the rights they hold of their work and along with these how they restrict the usage of it to interested parties.

After the introction to the Creative Commons licenses and its concept most users were quite interested in using them, but as we found out we struggling how to continue from there. Some participants were not familiar with HTML and had no idea how to tag their content properly with their chosen CC license.

We identified the following Motivations and Goals of users

Before the knowledge of CC the users goals consisted of their wish to publish their project work to their models they worked with, friends and potential clients as an impromptu portfolio.

After the introduction to CC all of them were interested in opening parts of their work to the commons and using a less restrictive license.

We identified the following important acitvities

• Usage of a web browser
• Activity in online communities or social networks and especially (micro)blogging platforms (tumblr, soup.io, facebook, fotocommunity)
• Performing image uploads on said platforms and adding tag information

Our Ideas

Idea title

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Another Idea title

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Implementations