Transcript for EO403 - Human Factors-Qualitative Methods 1.PDF

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Human Factors-Qualitative Methods 1 In this video, we will look at qualitative methods for understanding the user. The first one we will look at is a persona. So what are qualitative methods and tools? They are...

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Human Factors-Qualitative Methods 1 In this video, we will look at qualitative methods for understanding the user. The first one we will look at is a persona. So what are qualitative methods and tools? They are concerned with the real world and with culturally-situated conditions. We're not concerned with numbers and measurement when we're trying to understand the user. We're concerned with their opinion and their experience in the real world. Things like text and visual data output are important to us. Statistical numbers are not. How people interact, how they find things, how they feel-these are the important aspects when we think about qualitative methods and tools. The data is usually analysed through qualitative categorization. So it is a subjective inquiry. And it's about perceptions, counts, and so on. And it's very open-ended. Qualitative research is concerned with rich and in-depth data, so we can find out exactly how the user interacts with particular products. And we can understand them better. So qualitative methods and tools, it's real data, real world conditions that we're looking at. One such tool is the persona. And a persona is a fictional person who represents a major user group for products or services. And very often we'll advise students to create a persona when they're starting on a product development journey. Creating a persona can help give a user for a particular product at the beginning of the development of that product. Make up a person's name, be relevant. humour is not really appropriate in this case. Who are you going to design this particular product for? Include the right demographic information for the target market that you're designing for-so the age, the education, so on, the job title that person might have, and the responsibilities they might have. So who is this product going to be designed for? Include the goals and the tasks that this person is going to try to complete. And finally, include a quote that sums up what matters to that person. So a persona is a very useful tool to understand the user and to help direct the design development. Here are a few examples. It can be anybody that fits within your particular target market. By having an individual, a persona, we can always refer back to this person. Would this person like this feature? Why would this person want this feature? How would this person use this feature? Is this particular aspect of the design required for this person? We can always refer back to that persona to help guide us with the design development. Using a persona can help a designer to focus on user's needs and goals. What Page 1/2 is the age group of the persona? What are their desires? What are their hobbies? What is their income? All of these aspects can impact on the development and design of a product. Page 2/2