Data Gathering for Human-Centered Design
University of Maryland Baltimore County
This course is designed to introduce you to the ways and methods that IT designers, developers, and researchers discover who they are designing for. Our focus will be on techniques for collecting and analyzing data so that designers can develop a sense of empathy to not only better understand the people they are designing for, but to also better understand the problem they intend to solve from a human-centered perspective.
About this Course
Small tech startups, large corporations, and even government organizations are all beginning to recognize that creating solutions for their clients must go beyond simply producing functional and useable products/services. To best support their populations, designing tech solutions to problems must be more than functional. They must be more than usable. Solutions must be designed to maximize the totality of the experience that a person has with the designed solution. Achieving this goal must begin with a rich understanding of who we are designing for. The better, more complete and holistic understanding of our users as well as anyone that can be directly or indirectly affected by what we design, the more likely we can match the solution with the mental model of our users/stakeholders. In this course you will learn concepts, tools, and techniques, needed to gather data to better understand who you are designing for so that you can develop information system solutions that will maximize the experiences that users/stakeholders have with those solutions, enabling you to work in a myriad of real-world roles that require designing IT solutions for clients. You will learn concepts like the utility, usability and user experience, why it is important to understand who a system is designed for, and why it is important to deploy a diversity of techniques to truly get as complete a picture of your users and stakeholders as possible.
What You'll Learn
- Understand the difference between Utility, Usability, and User Experience
- Identify the types of data a questionnaire and an interview can best provide
- Discover how to structure questions and type of on-line controls that can be used to capture responses
- Discover procedures for obtaining information about your population through ways that go beyond just asking the users directly
- Understand what is Participatory Design and how can it be used in the design process
- Create a persona and identify the key elements of a persona
- Create a scenario and where it can be used
Instructors
Sidas Saulynas
Lecturer