09

Week 9

Today, Friday 4th March 2016

1. Tutorials on Sharing is caring, with Tor Njamo (Web Media graduate and president of RaveSU)

• Collective brainstorm on your next project: Our space

Your homework and blog!

Tutorials

Let's chat about your brain-catching ideas and content strategy.

We don't want to hear about coding issues until we have worked out your content strategy.

Let's not worry about how feasible / hard to build your ideas are at this point. Everything is figureoutable.

Our space

On this team project you will design and build a website for our Ravensbourne Web Media degree.

You will start from research: user interviews and competitor analysis. You will then define a content strategy and iterate your design ideas through wireframes. Finally, you will implement your designs into a WordPress-based website.

At the beginning of June, Web Media students and staff will vote one of your sites as the official site to represent our degree for the next year!

Research

Do we need research?

Think of a project you worked on. What role did research play in it? Was it good research?

What does research mean to you?

Research boils down to spending (a lot of) time observing people and talking to them, to find out:

• What are they currently doing?
• How are they doing something?
• What problems and challenges do they face?
• What do they want?
• What do they think they want?
• What do we think they want?

We use user research insight to inform design and improve development.

Two types of research

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is useful to answer why type of questions.

Questions, answers, insights and explanations are limited by a researcher’s understanding of users’ behaviours. The only way to increase that understanding is by actually interacting with and investigating behaviours, beliefs, and assumptions outside of our own behaviours, beliefs, and assumptions.

From Bill Selman, User Research Lead at Mozilla

Quantitative research

Useful to answer what and how (how much, how often..) types of questions.

Observe and measure.

Surveys and analytics are (mostly) quantitative methods.

Your turn

Together we will create a survey using Typeform, which you can start using from today!

• What questions can we ask people?
• Which questions are more important than others (we can't ask people to give us more than 5 minutes of their time)?
• How can we make our questions not leading?

Homework

Sharing is caring formative

1. Make a video-presentation (3 minutes max) of your Sharing is caring project.

   Focus on:

   • Audience Who is your site/campaign for?
   • Context What are your audience's goals and pain points? Where do we find these people?
   • Content What do they want to know about your cause?
   • Language How do you communicate your cause to them? What visual persuasion techniques will you use? Specifically, what words or sentences resonate with your audience?

• Upload your video-presentation to YouTube or Vimeo.

• Create a Name-Surname-WEB14105.md MarkDown document (where Name is your own name and Surname is your own surname, like Matteo-Menapace-WEB14105.md).

  In that document, add the following:

  • Video-presentation link, YouTube or Vimeo, make sure I have permissions to view it
  • Content strategy GDoc, see week 7 and make sure I have permissions to comment on it
  • Research GDoc, see homework from week 5 and make sure I have permissions to comment on it
  • Link to your project code on GitHub
  • BONUS: link to your project published on GitHub Pages, remember gh-pages from week 2?

• Upload your Name-Surname-WEB14105.md to Moodle.

Blog

Read and blog about this article: Interviewing humans.

Have you interviewed anyone before?

If yes:

• What worked?
• What could have been better?
• Anything that surprised you?
• What did you do with the data collected during your interview(s)?