INTERACTION DESIGN: beyond human-computer interaction, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7

DATA GATHERING

• 7.1 Introduction
• 7.2 Five Key Issues
• 7.3 Data Recording
• 7.4 Interviews
• 7.5 Questionnaires
• 7.6 Observation
• 7.7 Choosing and Combining Techniques

Objectives

The main aims of the chapter are to:

• Discuss how to plan and run a successful data gathering program.
• Enable you to plan and run an interview.
• Enable you to design a simple questionnaire.
• Enable you to plan and execute an observation.

7.1 Introduction

This chapter presents some techniques for data gathering which are commonly used in interaction design activities. In particular, data gathering is a central part of establishing requirements, and of evaluation. Within the requirements activity, the purpose of data gathering is to collect sufficient, accurate, and relevant data so that a set of stable requirements can be produced; within evaluation, data gathering is needed in order to capture users' reactions and performance with a system or prototype.

In this chapter we introduce three main techniques for gathering data: interviews, questionnaires, and observation. In the next chapter we discuss how to analyze and interpret the data collected. Interviews involve an interviewer asking one or more interviewees a set of questions which may be highly structured or unstructured; interviews are usually synchronous and are often face-to-face, but they don't have to be. Questionnaires are a series of questions designed to be answered asynchronously, i.e. without the presence of the investigator; these may ...