Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

…for my user research on the Google Maps Street View feature! I conducted five semi-structured interviews over IM for my Field Methods intensive, hoping to uncover issues with the Street View UI and to ask folks how they felt about privacy and the Street View photographs. For those interested in browsing through the results, feel free to download the final report. It’s only 8 pages of ‘content’ (the rest is all various appendices and interview transcripts), so it’s a pretty quick read.

Let me know what you think!

I just finished reading over a paper for my Field Methods intensive course (starts Monday!) that I found extremely interesting. Instead of relying on a traditional usability test or interview to get users to talk about their thoughts and feelings on mobile phones, this particular researcher used a more artistic medium: collages. The act of creating an artifact to express one’s thoughts on a project is not entirely new (people have been asked to draw things before), but collage is, by nature, an extremely rich medium for expression. As it turns out, it works extremely well for UX research when you’re trying to find out people’s opinions on products or services they’re already familiar with. The collage remains long after the user has left the session, and they are relatively easy to analyze (especially when you compare them to sifting through heaps of traditional data).

I never thought you could do research with such a creative form of expression! This is all incredibly interesting research.