Notes Seminar 1: Joakim

Notes Seminar 1

The first seminar will cover the initial phase of the project. We will discuss topics such as establishing needs and requirements, Data gathering and data analysis, interpretation and presentation. We want to understand the user and find out what the user needs!

By gathering data the needs and requirements of the users can be established. Both qualitative and quantitative data are typically gathered and triangulation used see the data in a wider perspective. Due to the rather small scope of our project, mostly qualitative data will be used, since we won't be able to gather enough data (using for exampe questionnaires) for quantitative analysis. I imagine a first step would be to conduct semi-structured interviews. Maybe combine this with naturalistic observations to see how the travellers interact with the environment. When sampling the target group (tourists) stratified sampling is a good approach. However, due to the limited time we will probably have trouble getting mutually exclusive subgroups to sample from.

Chapter 8 discusses analysis, interpretation and presentation of gathered data. Qualitative and quantitative data is to be handled differently, quantitative data is closely related to statistics where, with math, conclusions can be drawn. Qualitative data is not as straight-forward, but the goal is to recognize patterns and identify outliers.

Since the project is an iterative process we will after first iteration define scenarios and personas which probably will lead to new insights in needs and requirements.

My questions for this seminar is:

• First of all we need to agree on a specific project idea, what implications will this have on data gathering methods?
• Since the time for data gathering will be quite limited, which data gathering methods will best complement each other?