Chrissy's Week 6 Commentary

This week my overall goal was data collection and, as a group interpretation sessions for some of our contextual interviews. The structure our group came up with for interviews is to have brief surveys, medium length interviews, and longer, more in depth interviews. The goal of the surveys is to collect a lot of data from a wide variety of people. The goal of the medium length interviews is to have a handful of people to use the website and observe them trying to do simple tasks. The indepth, lengthy interviews will be done with the fewest amount of people, but we hope to get the most user data from them.
Over this last week I did four medium length interviews and passed out and analyzed about 25 surveys. In the interviews I observed 4 different people navigate the UCSD maps website doing the same tasks. The tasks included finding an easy location, a location of medium difficulty, and a location of hard difficulty. The locations we pick were Warren Lecture Hall 2204, the Natatorium, and UC 611. I made sure not to give them much direction so to observe how each person would go about finding these locations. I told them to use any means they wanted to try and find them. Watching them navigate the site was followed by a series of follow up questions including what they liked and didn't like about the site, what they thought was easy, what improvements they would suggest, and how comfortable they would be actually finding these locations.
Much of the data I collected was what was expected. My groups had previously aanalyzed the site and knew the porblems we saw and improvements we thought we'd like to make. However, I wanted to make sure that this process would be completely consumer driven, so I was able to allow my interviewee run the interview. I interviewed four UCSD students, all fourth years. Two were Muir students and have just lived on campus their first year. One was an ERC student who had lived on campus for two years, and one was a Marshall student who had lived on campus two years as well. A conclusion I found interesting was that all four seemed to think the sight was easy to navigate, but it just did not include enough information. All of the interviewees thought that they would be able to find these locations by walking or driving it would just probably take a while to find. Most agreed that the parking map was the best map to use despite its lack of a color code key. Ironically, everyone thought the visitor's map was the worse and conveyed the least amount of information. A major suggestion was to color code the biuldings by what type of buiding it was, ie. a lecture hall, living quarters, dining, ect. A second major complaint was the scrolling and zooming functions are very primitive.
The major theme from the surveys, I found was how many people actually use the website and how often. As a group we hope to get enough survey information to come up with accurate statistics that represent the UCSD population as a whole. It turns out, to my surprise that the majority of UCSD students have used the maps website on more than one occassion. The most common used is on a quarterly basis to find their classes. This only came as a surprise to me because before this project I had not used the maps website. As a fourth year, I always called Edna for help with finding classes.
During our interpretation sessions, my group was able to come up with some good ideas aabout where the users would like us to take the maps website. Some ideas being tossed around are making sure the user has a reference point and possibly making it possible for students to edit their own map online so that their class routes are highlighted and important locations for each student are marked. Another idea we may like to incorporated is different detailed maps depending on what the needs of the user are. For example, the website could contain a map for driving directions where the roads are in great detail and the building are not in as much detail.
The goals for next week are to pass out about 25 more surveys and review the data. I would also like to finish up two more medium length interviews as well as two long interviews. I hope I will be able to do at least one indepth interview with a visitor, and I would like to conduct medium length interviews on a wider variety of students, such as first and second years. As a group we hope to continue our interpretation sessions and create models next week. Tomorrow I will be preparing slides for our presentation to the class on our progress. If we can accomplish all of this than we will be on schedule.