February 2012
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
8h 23m
English
Content preview from Universal Methods of Design
02 AEIOU
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SYNTHESIS / ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE
02 AEIOU
AEIOU is an organizational framework reminding the researcher to attend to, document, and code information under a guiding taxonomy of Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, and Users.1
Even when observations are only casually or semi-structured, it pays to have an organizational framework in mind, such that the researcher attends to key details. AEIOU is an easy mnemonic for guiding and coding observations. As a heuristic, or rule of thumb, the taxonomy defines each feature of the observation set as follows:
• Activities are goal-directed sets of actions. What are the pathways that people take ...