Theme 5: Design Research

Haibo Li’s and et al. articles

The article Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration explored the possibility to connect a ball (during a football game) to the mobile. The users would feel vibrations indicating attacking directions, movements of the ball and so on, by holding their phones.

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?

In the article the researchers use the usability evaluation covers three aspects of usability: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Effectiveness can for example be measured by success-to-fail ratio in completing assignment of the project or device. Efficiency is how much power or effort is needed to finish the assignment. Satisfactions is the user’s (or people it affects) acceptability and comfort with the system.

2. What role will prototypes play in research?

When researching a subject it is very easy to become emerged and very knowledgeable of that subject in comparison with perhaps the target groups’ knowledge. Creating a prototype - making your ideas and theory into something practical is a great way of testing your product and  analyse how it is apprehended by the target group. Maybe it isn’t as easy to understand as you first thought and changes are needed for better usability.

3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

A proof of concept prototype investigates the possibilities and solutions for the prototype. Here the researches can get inputs on how to make their prototype before actually creating it. This is needed to not create unnecessary prototypes.

4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

There can be many characteristics of the prototype - it can be done on paper or as an almost finished prototype (app or website or so on). But the one thing all prototypes have in common is that they are not the actual finished product. The limitations of the prototype is just that, that it isn’t actually the finished product. That is it might not function properly or have the finished design yet. This can disturb people who will test the prototype and make them focus on these things instead of the actual testing.

5. How can design research be communicated/presented?

I think it is always valuable to present with images, graphs etc since these are easier and it usually is faster to interpret and understand them than with text. Design research can be presented in similar ways, and also with the prototypes used.

Eva-Lotta Sallnäs’ et al. articles

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

A collaborative setting is more complex than a single user setting since more than one person participates in the activity around the device. Thus, more people need to evaluated by the researches. This is more difficult than to analyse one person in a single user setting. An example of a collaborative setting is in one of Sallnäs’ articles where students was grouped to work together. Usually when working in group many have different perspectives and ideas - therefore the results can be very varying or more innovative than in a single user setting since the participants are exposed to different points of views (not always of course).

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

As learned during the last seminar, quantitative methods mostly collects data which can be compiled and compared with numbers. This gives a broad overview of a subject and these result can be more generalised. Qualitative methods give more in-depth and specific results. However, they are more difficult to analyse. Since one method is more of an “overview” and the other is more in-depth they complement each other quite well since they are almost like opposites. Several perspectives are thus presented by using both methods.

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

Subjective is highly dependent on the individuals thoughts while objective methods is something that should move away from individual thoughts and analyse phenomenons without personal feelings. This is a bit similar to why qualitative and quantitative methods complement each other and it’s because they give different perspectives (and are almost opposites). The same works for subjective and objective, they give more than one perspective which enhances the possibility to better understand a phenomenon.