Technology use & breakdown

The point of this assignment is for you to understand someone else's use of a website or software application and their "pain points" associated with use.

Detailed requirements

1. Find one person with whom you are acquainted who is significantly different than you on at least two of the following dimensions (what I call demographics) below: age, gender, country of origin, computer experience, level of education. It is fine if you know this person, though intimates (spouses, children, parents) are not recommended. In the remainder of this assignment, we will call this person the participant. Inform them that the inquiry will not take more than about 30 minutes. Explain to the participant the nature of the assignment and ask if they will participate. Explain to them that you will be discussing their answers during class, and that no one but your classmates and professor will have any information about these interviews. If they do not consent, then choose another participant.
2. You will do a contextual inquiry of this person's use of a website or software application. In advance of the inquiry, ask the participant to think of their least favorite website or software application. That is, they should select their least favorite "place to go" on the Internet to do specific things, or their least favorite program that they occasionally use on their computer.
   
3. This interview should be in their home using their computer. For each participant, ask the following questions. Take notes of their answers. 
   • State the name of the website or application.
   • What do they use it for, and how do they use it?
   • Ask them to demonstrate their use of it while you watch. Ask them to talk about what they are doing as they do it.
   • Why is it their least favorite? Try to have them demonstrate the "pain points" or points of failure. In other words, by the end of this contextual inquiry, you should understand in what specific ways this website/application does not take care of this person as it should.
     
   • When they encounter these "pain points" or points of failure, how do they work around this? What do they do to get whatever they are doing completed despite the problems that they encounter?
     
   • What is their most salient memory concerning the use of this site/application?
   • If they could, what would they change about this site/application? What would they keep the same?
4. Obtain a few screenshots, particularly those that are connected with their "pain points."
5. Ask them to provide any demographic information that you do not know (note that it is OK to approximate age - exact age is not necessary).
   

The Deliverable

Create a document (.doc or .docx) that has two to four pages of text interspersed with images answering the questions above. In addition, you should provide user's demographic information, as well as an indication of your relationship to this user. Provide a description of what they do and say as they demonstrate use. You should convey a clear description of their pain points and reasons why. You should illustrate the pain points using between 3 and 5 images of not more than 200kb each.

Changelog

9 January 2013. Added a requirement to obtain demographic information, and to report this and the relationship to the user in the deliverable.
8 January 2013. Original version.