For one of our first tutorials in the Interaction Design module we jumped straight into observation. In groups we made our way to different areas of the University campus (I was in the library) and we sat as passive observers with students and staff.
Working as a team, we saw there was an opportunity to collect different forms of observation data to strengthen our understanding of the library context. We especially wanted to look at what people were doing, how they were organised, and their actions and interactions. Using a variety of observation methods would also help us understand the many challenges that come with observation which was the overall goal of the exercise.
We divided the group so that two people made note of student and staff behaviour using a basic framework, and one person (myself) practiced ethnography observation such as room layout sketching and recording snippets of conversation. As I had wished to practice sketching I was glad to take on this task. The remaining two members recorded basic information about the person being observed (gender, and estimates of age and ethnicity), where they were in the library and what the person was doing or interacting with. Each event was recorded with their time of occurance. Although we had debated using a more detailed observation framework, such as those by Goetz and LeCompte (1984) or Robson (2002), because it was our first visit to the library we decided to stick with a basic framework. This is because we wanted to capture the general library environment in our observation without getting distracted by unnecessary details which would lead to us losing the bigger picture.
I didn’t include character expressions because the idea of the sketch was to capture general behaviour, not feelings towards a particular event.
At the end of the exercise we had collected a lot of information and this helped us build a very strong impression of the common tasks sought after by visitors to the library. I found sketching to be a particularly useful exercise because it encouraged me to look very closely at what people were doing and to pick out interesting activities, such as commonly seen activities among students or difficulties that staff were experiencing. I found observation in general to be a lot of fun and I was excited to understand more about some of the problems I had observed students to experience by forming a questionnaire.
Something I enjoyed about the exercise was finding a style and colour scheme. With this initial sketch I gathered lots of interactions on one piece of paper in case any were relevant to a storyboard. I decided to separate the sketches on to separate sheets, however, to highlight that the events were unrelated. I also thought that using a black pen only gave the sketches a cleaner look.