After exercise 1

Exercise 1, field studies and understanding the user, and the subsequent interviews.

In the first exercise we were introduced to the idea of field studies. We discussed with our group different methods of gaining an insight into the potential user-base of our product. We were instructed to do interviews and we set out to defining how we were to conduct these interviews and to what extent we should rely upon them. The most important consideration we tackled was that of establishing the goals of our interview. The literature tells is that rather than going in trying to figure out potential product ideas from open-ended questions to the public we ought to set clear goals, although we ought not be afraid to modify these goals if something new and exciting pops up. The goals we settled on were the following: identify when, why and how often the interviewee visits the chosen museum, and how the interviewee would characterize the nature of his visit. An added goal, and a more specific one relating to our product idea, was to get an understanding of how often the interviewee eats at the museum restaurant and to what extent the possible queues affect the interviewee's eating habits at the restaurant.

We also discussed how we ought to observe the potential users outside the formal interviews. We concluded that we ought to be as casual as possible as not to disturb the field environment and as such try to make a good “quick and dirty” observation. We chose to focus on an outsider observation since our skills as observers were not capable of conducting a participating observation and we didn't want to disturb the museum goers with such either. We decided to do a single interview each and then spend the rest of the time acting as normal museum visitors to observe the other museum visitors. The goals for the observations were to focus on how the visitors dealt with crowded spaces, in particular their emotional reactions, along with investigating the nature of the visitors that chose to eat at the restaurant.

Finally we decided on using audio recordings in addition to written notes. The Audio was used in the interviews while the written notes were used to catalog observations. We chose against using a camera due to the intrusive nature of such and the ban on filming inside the museum itself.