3.4.1 Data Collection Methods
Interviews
An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked by the interviewer to elicit facts or statements from the interviewee.[53] An interview can be unstructured, structured or semi-structured. An unstructured interview is more like a open conversation between the interviewer and the inter-viewee. Usually you decide on a topic in advance and you have an open discussion about it. A structured interview is a quantitative research method where the questions are predefined and asked accordingly with no opportunity to divert. A semi-structured interview is more open. You might have some predefined ques-tions as well as some open question allowing new ideas to be brought up during the interview. I have used this method to gather information and discuss ideas and design during this thesis. See section4.3.1.
Passive observation
Observing people or things in their natural habitat without interfering with the flow of actions, the people or things you are observing or the environment is called passive observation. It’s most commonly referred to as being a fly on the wall. I chose to use this observation technique in order to gain information and investigate the use of multi-touch devices amongst children in the Oslo area.
Litterature Survey
A literature survey is a good way to collect data about previous research on a specific topic. The definition of a literature survey is a text written by someone to consider the critical points of current knowledge including substantive findings as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to a particular topic [54].
In order to know what has been done before, a literature survey is an essential method. It is essential because as a researcher, one needs to know what other researchers already have discovered and tested. In this way you avoid doing du-plicate work, as well as you get an overview on where to start when conducting your own research.
Why Use Litterature Survey?
“Researchers working in isolation are doomed to repeat the mistakes made by their predecessors.” [55] This quote by Cooper Cooper [55] describes one of the main reasons of why I chose to include literature survey as one of my research-methods in this thesis. As I am new to the multi-touch and gamification field it was important to build a solid foundation of theory and information before conducting my own design process. Going into the design process as well as the prototyping stages of my work the literature review made it a lot easier to define my goal. In addition to this it gave me a set of guidelines to follow when designing for a multi-touch table.
3.4.2 Design Methods
Brainstorming
A common technique used to generate ideas is called brainstorming. The technique is used within a group and has its focus on getting the participants to speak their ideas whatever they might be. There should be no criticism of the ideas that are proposed and the more ideas the better. I chose to use this technique as one of my methods to generate game-ideas in the concept-development phase of my design process. The session is described in detail in section 4.3.2.
Mind map
Mind maps are like a sorted diagram often used together with brainstorming. A mind map has a central question or topic in the middle, and all the ideas generated from the brainstorming session is sorted and placed along branches that flows outwards from the center. It is used a visualized tool to classify and structure the ideas and can be used as a reminder at a later stage in the design process. I used this creative technique to sort and categorize all of the ideas that emerged from the brainstorming session to get a better and more conclusive overview of the ideas. The mind-map is described in section4.3.3.
Workshops
A workshop is a constructive meeting between different stakeholders where the goal is to achieve a set of predefined goals. The participants work together to find solutions and give feedback on a particular design, concept or prototype.
Workshops can be used in different phases of a project. It can be used early in the design process to define basic guidelines and features, or it can be used later in a test phase where the goal of the workshop is to test and get feedback on a more or less complete version of a prototype. The workshops conducted in this thesis is described in detail in section 4.4.1 and 4.8.2
Why use workshops?
In most projects you develop something for someone other than yourselves. In order to know what your ’customer’ wants, it’s important to include them in the project. There are many ways to do this, and workshops are one of them. In accordance to participatory design, I felt that it was important to let the target group influence the decision making-process, as well as give feedback on differ-ent parts of the multi-touch game. It is always difficult for a developer to see the world through someone elses eyes, but using workshops as a method shrinks this gap and makes it easier to understand problems from their point of view.
3.4 Interviews An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked by the interviewer to elicit facts or statements from the inter-viewee.[16] An interview can be unstructured, structured or semi-structured. An unstructured interview is more like a open conversation between the interviewer and the interviewee. Usually you decide on a topic in advance and you have an
open discussion about it. A structured interview is a quantitative research method where the questions are predefined and asked accordingly with no opportunity to divert. A semi-structured interview is more open. You might have some prede-fined questions as well as some open question allowing new ideas to be brought up during the interview. I have used this method to gather information and discuss ideas and design during this thesis.
3.4.3 Card sorting
“Card sorting is a simple technique in user experience design where a group of users inexperienced with design are guided to generate a category tree or folkson-omy.” [56] It was used during the design process of this thesis to identify problems related to multi-touch tables and shared space, thus not really to create interesting categories for the game, but rather to observe how the users performed card sort-ing. The categories I was interested in had to do with how often they interfered with each others work or how well they cooperated during the task.