ADS 300, UX Design Methods, Spring 2022
Tuesday / Thursday @ 4:00-5:15pm
Marvin 216B
Matt Kirkland / mattk@ku.edu

Week 4

February 8 /10

How do I research users? And why?

We'll cover: Intro to design research. Why do designers research? what kinds of things qualify as research?

Ethnographic Research

This week we'll focus on a subset of research methods: ethnographic research. Find out what your users do now! We'll do a light touch overview of ethnographic research models. We'll cover:

• popular media scan
• literature / niche reading
• interest groups
• field study
• contextual inquiry
• desirepath/postit/annotations
• diary studies
• interviews
• SME interview

Resources

• Erika Hall Just enough research book
• Erika Hall design research video
• Interviewing Humans article
• Another good intro to doing User Interviews
• One Article and Another on Subject Matter Expert Interviews
• Short intro to Contextual Inquiry
• A sampling of Studio D's field study writing

Assignment

For Thursday February 10 :
• Watch the Erika Hall design research video

For Tuesday February 15 by 8am, as always!:
• Choose a flavor of ethnographic research; do it and report findings in your workbench report. Remember: you are trying to find out how people solve the problem, or use the thing, right now - before you do any new design work.
• Submit your report about what you did, what you learned, etc, via the google form link as usual.