Theme 6: Post-reflections

This week has been quite similar to the assignment for two weeks ago. It was about quantitative research, while this week focused on qualitative research methods and case studies. I thought it was hard to find a good paper that used case studies, because I thought it was difficult to know exactly what counts as a case study. As I understood it a case study is a research method that examines a problem or phenomenon in depth.

Also this week we had to choose two papers that use the respective research method. Of these tasks, I learned most by finding and read other papers. I think it's a useful learning to bring with me when I am doing my final degree project next year. 

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

I have read the paper “The Evolving Mobile Media: Uses and conceptualizations of the Mobile Internet”, written by Lee Humphreys, Thilo von Pape and Veronika Karnowski and published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

This study looks at the use of mobile Internet, and examines whether there are cultural differences in the use and perception of mobile Internet. By interviewing 21 college students; 11 mobile Internet users from the U.S. and 10 from Germany.

In this study the authors are using semi-structured interviews, this means that the same questions were asked to all the participants and the questions were open. The interviews were conducted face-to-face, and were held in a separate room with each of the 21 participants. The interviews lasted for about 30 min. The questions dealt with: where and when they use mobile Internet, how they look at mobile Internet, and the difference between their use of mobile Internet and the use of Internet on their computer.

The benefits of this kind of qualitative research are that you can get thorough information, and with these semi-structured interviews with open-ended responses you have a higher chance of getting honest answers. A disadvantage of face-to-face interviews is leaded questions, depending on how questions are consolidated. In this study the authors had thought about the importance of the participants feeling relaxed during the interview, and therefore they hired a person who asked the questions. They suspected that the participants would feel nervous if one of their professors were held the interview. I think this is an important thing to keep in mind when conducting qualitative research, if the participants feel relaxed, it is a higher chance that the person dares to open up and answer detailed and honestly to the questions.

Just like I wrote in my last week's blog post, I think it is best to combine a qualitative study with a quantitative study, to get many and thorough responses which may facilitate the analysis and lead to a more accurate result. I also think 21 participants is too little to build a result on.

Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

A case study is based on deep-focused data collection and examines something specific. This can for instance be an event, behaviour or an individual. A case study examines, describes or explains a phenomenon. By examining the problem in depth, it is then easier to understand and analyse the results.

Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarized in Table 1) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.

I have read the paper "The Effects of Piracy Upon the Music Industry: a Case Study of Bootlegging" written by Lee Marshall and published in the journal Media Culture Society.

This article looks at an area of piracy known as bootlegging - and discusses how bootlegging can affect the music industry. The paper describes the distinction between bootlegging and other types of piracy and then discusses boot leggings effects on the music industry. The author can not draw clear conclusions from the study, and believes that further research is needed. The study just presents what the benefits of bootlegging can be, but to be defined as a good case study, I think it would have required more evidence.

Theme 5: Post-reflections

This week has been very interesting! We have read about design research and how and why to use prototypes in design processes.

Today had Ylva ​​and Haibo Li a respective lecture. Unfortunately I missed Ylvas lecture, but Haibo lis was fun and interesting.

In the future I would like to work with interaction design, so I think this week was especially rewarding for me. As I wrote in my blog post last week, I recognized a lot of what we read about from the Human-computer interaction -courses that I read last year, but it was fun to focus on the subject again. It would have been fun to have a seminar and discuss the topic with the rest of the class too. 

Theme 5: Design research

I have read the paper Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration, written by Haibo Li and his colleagues. When reading the text I reflected on the following questions:

What role will prototypes play in research?

Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

I think that prototypes play an important role in research and design processes. To make prototypes in a early stage of the process increases the chances that the process are moving in the right direction, and you can soon change and solve any problem with the product. Because of this you can reduce the costs and improve the product so that the users will be satisfied and the sale of the product might increase.

It is a difficult thing to predict what a user will request, therefore it is important to make thorough and developed prototypes. Since all people are different, have different requirements and also previous experience prototyping is an important part of the design process. To get a sense of how the product will be received by future customers you need to manufacture a product that is as similar as possible to the final product. Participants must be able to see the product in front of them and get a chance to feel and squeeze the product to get a good idea of the final product. Simply analyse the product by using qualitative or quantitative methods are not enough to get enough response from the participants.

To test the prototype on participants is a way to test usability. The authors of the text use the ISO Recommendations for developing a prototype and measuring three different aspects of usability; effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.

A good prototype can also measure how easy the final product will be to manage and how easy it will be to learn the product's features. Just as Haibo Li describe in the text one of the main characteristics of new technologies is that the product is easy to assimilate and learn. Is it too difficult, I think you lose many users' interests.

The vibrations development that describes in the text is a new development and is not previously available on the market, that makes it important to measure usability after the participants have been trained and practice the system.

In design projects like this, where it is a pretty advanced technology, the prototypes need to be worked through. I think it's difficult, as a designer to determine what might be misunderstood or what may be deficiencies of the product, therefor its requires thoughts and opinions from outsiders.

As development in the text requires that the test persons can test the product as accurate as possible. A sketch or questionnaire would not be able to provide the feed-backs that you need. This means that it takes more energy and money to create a prototype that can provide the participants experience of the final product.To keep costs down, I think it is good idea to make many prototypes that are continuously tested on the participants, to avoid that the prototype is lacking and the whole design process must start over.

Because of differences in materials, processes and design the prototype can not be designed exactly like the finished product, this can obviously do that the survey will not be accurate.