Overview

For this assignment, you will observe someone working in an office or home computer environment. The observation should be centered around a routine task (e.g. reviewing email, cleaning up the desktop) on the computer. Your analysis of the observation should address a few select questions that would be useful to the person you observe.

Identify the context for observation

Identify a work situation commonly conducted by an acquaintance such as a colleague, relative or friend. Example tasks for the work situation include:

• Reviewing an email Inbox
• Organizing or cleaning up a computer's desktop
• Developing an application
• Reviewing and responding to messages in a discussion forum

After obtaining informed consent from the person you plan to observe, schedule an observation visit. To qualify as a site observation, the following must be true:

• It must be a real task that the subject would be doing even if you were not observing.
• The task must be performed in a location where it is typically performed.
• The task must be performed at a time when it is typically performed.

Your observation should have minimal impact on how the task is performed.

Analysis questions

Before you observe, construct four to six questions that you plan to answer from your observation. Here are some examples:

• What is the environment or context in which the task is performed? Are other tasks being performed simultaneously? What artefacts are involved? Are there any interruptions?
• What actions are performed to complete the task?
• Which actions take the most time?
• Do some actions need to be repeated to effectively accomplish their objectives (i.e. their respective subgoal)?
• For frequent actions, what is the mean time and variance?
• Which actions give people difficulty?
• How could the process for doing the task be improved?
• How is the ergonomics of the work environment? Could anything be improved? If so, what?

When constructing your analysis goals, develop questions that address aspects of the bold-faced questions. Focus on questions whose answers would be useful to the person you are observing.

Conducting the observation

You are encouraged to video-record the task, but it is not required to successfully complete this project. For actions on a computer, consider using interaction-recording software such as Camtasia (free 30-day trial) or Ovo Solo (free for students). If you do not record the task, you will find it easier to observe and take notes for a longer task whose actions have a larger granularity (i.e. over a minute per action).

You will need to obtain informed consent. Furthermore, you must document the informed consent if you record the task.

Your analysis questions should guide your observation and what you record as you observe. For the question on ergonomics, you may want to use items from the online checklist.

Analysis and Report

Your report should contain the following:

• Answers to your analysis questions
• Explanations of how your observation supports your answers
• Your procedure for conducting the observation
• Informed consent process

The report should be professionally organized and formatted. Emphasize content that would be most useful to the person that was observed. Also consider other stakeholders (e.g. manager, software designers, human resources personnel) when writing the report. The additional contents should be easy to find. We will discuss possible presentation strategies in class.

I will encourage you to share your report with the person you observed. At some point in the quarter (not part of the assignment), we will discuss any feedback you receive.

Submission

Please place all contents in one document using a common format (e.g. Word, PDF, RTF, HTML). Submit this document through the DL Web submission site.

Grading

Generally, any project that closely adheres to the above instructions will receive at least 16 (out of 20) points. Projects that are thoughtful, well-edited, systematic and concise will generally receive 18 or 19 points. A truly outstanding report will receive 20 points. Note that a long report is not necessarily a good report!

I will consider the following issues when grading the reports:

• Clarity of the analysis questions and answers
• Report usability and readability (good formatting and writing are essential!)
• Reproducible procedure for observation
• Clear description of results and how they support answers
• How informed consent was addressed