User Research Plan

There are two phases in my user research plan: traditional user research and intrusive user research. The intrusive user research is in between user research and prototype. It aims to observe how people change their behavior by objects we give than existing behavior. Because most of the web 2.0 apps are not based on existing user needs, intrusive user research is to bridge this gap.

The first phase is traditional user research. There are three things need to be observed: internet usage, mobile phone usage and normal life. Understanding internet usage is to catch some trends of relationship between internet and user. Understanding mobile phone usage will more focus on the context people use phone and internet by phone. Try to understand how and why accessing internet by phone change qualitatively by context. Observing the normal life will focus on how people communicate or interact with others and information, and some urban life or events such as transportation, cleaning trash..

For internet usage, there are two things to do: analyzing online behavior and analyzing screen behavior. Analyzing online behavior will be done by carnivore (http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/) which will surveillance all internet traffic and be visualized by processing to see the usage pattern. This will let us know more about how we use internet. Analyzing screen behavior will be done by shadowing someone using computer and try to identify the task they do and visualize it. Or find a software that can record the screen.

For mobile phone usage, I will find some users who use 3G with smartphone to record everything they do on it with the format below.
When: 2009/05/01 3:00
What: call
Who: to student
Why: for video exhibition
Where: home
Note: we talked for ten minutes
Then, visualize it by processing and try to find out the relationship between using phone and context.

For the normal life, it will be conducted by interview. It is hard part for me. How to get inspiring data is challenging. There should be two rounds of pilot interview to get the good interview questions.

After traditional user research, I hope there will be some interesting ideas and then use intrusive user research to get deeper understanding of what it means and what it could be.