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

Week 5

February 15 / 17 ...
but actually we had a sick day and a snow day so this got pushed to February 22

How to I get my users to help?

Participatory Research Methods

Last week we looked at observing your users from the outside, this week we'll look at working TOGETHER with your users, and getting their active engagement. We're stil focused on discovery, though: learning about the problem or thing you are designing and how it operates in the world today.

• focus groups *
• surveys (likert, etc) *
• semantic differential *
• affinity diagram / card sort
• crowdsource / mechanical turk
• love letter / breakup letter
• brainstorming / graphic organizers / mind maps / etc
• graffiti walls *(for cowards)
• swimlane diagrams (of existing stuff!)

Resources

• Nielsen/Norman Group on Card Sorting
• goofy video on Smart Design's 'love letter / breakup letter'
• A bit about Swimlanes

Assignment

For Thursday Feb 24
• No assigned text this week!

For Tuesday Mar 1 (by 8am as always):
• Choose a flavor of participatory research; do it and report findings in your playground notebook. 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. As before I am ruling out the methods with an asterisk, because I want to force you to actually TALK with PEOPLE.
• Special note here! We're combining this week 6 content with week 5 content, so you should choose a method from EITHER week 5 or week 6. You don't need to do one of each.
• Also remember to root this activity in the QUESTIONS that you want to answer. It's sometimes useless to just talk aimlessly with people, but always useful to have a resarch question in mind that you want to get answered!