Droid Trainer

Due October 7, 2009

Overview

The process of Contextual Inquiry, handily outlined by Kaufmann, is a powerful user-centric technique that facilitates high-level contextual design. To begin this process, the ActiveIM team drafted a series of questions that will be issued via interview to potential users of our currently proposed solution. Our users were generally university students, both graduate and undergraduate, in and around Michigan. Interviews were given either over the phone or in-person whenever possible. After conducting the interviews, the team gathered together for interpretation sessions wherein all the disparate feedback we had received during the interviews was aggregated and sifted in order to generate notes for the affinity diagram. The affinity diagram is a furcated chart that displays and clusters together congruent notes into meaningful motifs that can inform and challenge our solution.

Interviews

As stated, our interviews with users were either over the phone or in-person whenever possible. Additionally, we targeted several University of Michigan Recreational Sports faculty members for interviews in order to glean information about users and other information to motivate our design. Users were acquaintances, friends, and family members of various persons of the ActiveIM team and were quite amiable to the interview process. After the first five interviews and their interpretation sessions, we revised and honed our questions for the following interviews. For consistency, we also followed up the first five interviews with our updated questions.

Interpretation Sessions

Following the interviews, our team conducted two rounds of interpretation sessions.  These sessions were completed to capture highlights as well as dive deeper into the responses of the interviewees.  During the interpretation sessions, the notetaker shared her notes with the rest of the group.  The team then took advantage of this process by capturing affinity notes during this interview “debriefing” process.  As the notetaker shared an interesting anecdote, a unique comment, or even an interview response that matched our assumptions, a teammate would say, “I’ll get that one,” and he would capture this idea onto an affinity note.  The notetaker would then proceed with rest of the interview.  We found this to be a very successful way to fully capture the breadth of the interviews, which we would come to understand after manipulating these notes into our affinity diagram.

Affinity Diagram

The notes we captured in our interpretation sessions were used to create our affinity diagram. We started this design process by reading off our notes and placing them on our board. Gradually notes with similar topics began to organically form groups. This process of organizing our findings led us to rearrange, break apart and define new categories and subcategories based on emerging themes we found across users.

Major Themes:

Preferences

• Behavior and Culture
• Personal Factors

Engagement

• Reasons for participation
• Sign-Up

Communication

• Staying Informed
• Social Network Types

After we built our affinity diagram, we held an interpretation session to develop design recommendations about our findings. As we brainstormed various solutions, our team was adamant about having our user data ultimately inform our design solution. We kept reverting back to the affinity diagram to confirm whether or not our ideas were supported by our findings.

Key Findings & Design Ideas

Based on the findings from the affinity wall, we were able to distill a number of design insights that we can keep in mind going forward with our project. The first is that students want to workout with people that they know. So our product will have to enable people to form teams or groups with friends, along with being able to participate individually. Secondly, students have very busy schedules, and exercise and recreation is incredibly hard to fit in. So our product will have to allow users to participate on their own time. Most users interviewed said they fit exercise and activities in where they can, but it is not a priority, so we would like our product to be a kind of competition or game they can play with their friends.

Additionally, our inquiry found that students tend not to use status messages to keep informed about recreation, and also don’t use them very often to let others know they are active on campus. So in response to this, we want our product to have an achievement system. This will let users view what others have achieved in this game and keep them informed about what other players are actively doing. This may give them an incentive to participate by seeing what others are doing.

Also, students tend to participate both in organized group sports (such as organized IM sports or Club sports), but also in spontaneous events that can occur on a moments notice (such as going for a run), so we want our product to allow for both customized activities that the user can build for themselves and schedule with others, but also let them take on what we call “dares” or “challenges” that are chosen stochastically.

Finally, we noticed that students are finding out about and coordinating activities on campus through very ad-hoc means. Our product would provide a centralized service that helps students find activities quickly and efficiently without having to spend lots of extra time just trying to find or organize a group activity.