Sitting behind students
Last week (-2 days holiday) and this week I spent organising and conducting “hangout” sessions. A hangout session is spending time with a student, shadowing his/her activities for about half a day and observing how people read and do related activities such as note taking, searching etc… These sessions proved to be one of the most data rich experiences, and I feel I have learnt a tremendous amount, even though I only had 4 sessions so far. The ability to observe in context and have the opportunity to clarify things soon after an action proved to be very valuable and brought up many issues which I am starting to try to consolidate in my head and on paper. I did a bit less interviews and hangout sessions than initially planned, but now I am actually glad that I still have a few incentives available: I can use those at design stage to get some feedback on prototypes and sketches.
As the data from the diaries comes in (which has started now) and as I process all the incoming information so far, I would like to start organising for the validation survey. This is tricky for various reasons: students are mainly at home at this time of the year (although they can participate online) and the analysis phase of the project is closing in shortly next week. My aim is to have a preliminary online survey set up by the end of this week, and with luck publish it next week when I started to make sense of the available data. This way the survey will not be a standalone probe, but would build organically on the top of all the data gathered so far, validating assumptions which are already formulating in my head. The survey probably will run in parallel with the design stage to allow wider student participation.
This week I also plan to visit some departmental libraries to get a sense of variety and understand some of the issues around physical spaces. Another thing which is in progress is organising 2 days in the design phase at a commercial design company, allowing me to bounce off ideas with other user experience and information architecture professionals, which I think will be very valuable - he ability to creatively challenge a piece of work like this is very important I think.
I realise that I haven’t been doing very well on keeping up with my weekly whacky posts, the reason is that I simply had no time to think about things like that in the past few weeks. I am hoping now that the observation period is coming to an end this will change.
Smashed by data
Last week was very busy, but extremely productive. My head is full of fresh experiences, and a LOT of data which I am trying to let sink in. I am consciously making an effort not to get bogged down with details at the moment, and keep a fairly high level eye on everything. Here is a short account on what I have been through the last week, adding some thoughts along the way.
Interviews
Last week I finished all the planned interviews, managing to speak to 8 students. Luckily I had access to a diverse crowd and the amount of things I managed to uncover is pretty good. My approach here was to have semi-structured discussions, meaning the conversation touched on a number of base topics such as Discovery, Organisation, Actions, Daily life, Technology, Emotions and Social interactions, but was not pre-scripted allowing to organically explore the topics with the participants. Each interview was recorded, so that I will be able to spend more time making notes of them during the analysis phase of the project, and allowing me to spend only a little time after each interview gathering my thoughts and impressions.
The first things which struck me as I went ahead with the interviews is that students are extremely helpful and accommodating when they see how a piece of research can impact their daily life. For me this yet again proves that the student community is more than willing to engage with activities like this, we just simply don’t tend to take advantage of this incredible resource often enough. However I made a mistake when planning the project: the amount of time needed to organise the interviews and the physical location of the interviews meant that my library observation had to be constantly interrupted. I vastly underestimated the lead in and out time around the interviews and the amount of time needed just to maintain email correspondence with students. Next time I know that these two activities can not be done in parallel.
Focus group
Last Thursday (Dec 1) we held a 2 hour long focus group with 5 students. I had 7 students signed up, but 2 had to drop out due to university commitments. Again this proved to be an excellent way of finding out more about experiences, desires and values. The first part of the focus group was spent on moderated discussion around the base topics mentioned above. Then we split into 2 groups and embarked on a mission to construct a robot and fairy which would serve in a library. The activity was really fun, and the general feedback was very positive. We concluded the session with a short discussion on technology and the students sent messages in a bottle for future students on reading. For this activity I asked my colleague Anne-Sophie to help me out with note taking. She used the wall of the room to take notes on post-it notes and organise them in real-time according to the base topics, and differentiating between who said what. We ended up with an almost full wall (5m) of organised notes, and the standard voice recording of the whole session.
Hangouts
On Friday I had my first “hangout” session with a Philosophy/Psychology student at the Trinity library. This was one of the most “data rich” experiences in the project so far, the amount of detail you can capture just spending informal time with a student is astonishing. She gave me a tour of the library and then she went on to do what she would normally do in the library, with me shadowing her in the background and peeking over her shoulder to her screen. During the session she was very helpful and offered clear explanations on why she is doing certain activities. Definitely one of the highlights so far, and one of the best use of the £30 Amazon vouchers so far.
Library observation
Besides all the above, I worked at the English Faculty Library when I had time, and observed what’s going on. This was quite fragmented, but still managed to make quite a bit of notes and now I can see some patterns/regulars which wouldn’t have seen otherwise. As I said earlier, next time I will not plan observation and other major activities on the same week as it is impossible to do them well, however I was somewhat forced considering how close the end of term is (was).
This week I will continue with hangouts, and gradually switch over to focusing more on visiting more libraries and doing more observations. At some point I will also need to start thinking about the things I learnt and start to construct an online validation survey for my assumptions. Luckily there are still students here and the library is still not empty…
