Our project focus on how to improve the after school program, attract more children and help low income family children to attend the after school program. In the fist phase, we have done the amount of research on papers and online, and choose 3 main ideas on marketing, transportation and community. So during the 20 days after the first submission, we start to interview real managers, teachers and students in the after school program to get more practical suggestions and data to help us pick up one specific idea and define.
After listening Bruce Hannington’s lecture, the methods in user experience are very useful and give me more clear thoughts on how to conduct our project for the design part. So I have read the research toolbook again and again, and try to finger out which methods are suitable for our project and make a plan about how to use them. There is the detailed plan about the methods I picked up as below.
1. Interview: We have scheduled time next week with Nina Marie Barbuto, who is the adjunct Instructor of school of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She is teaching Saturday Art Connection Classes at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. We would ask her some questions about one of our ideas that encourages students to spend time after school in museums. And we have talked with Stephen MacIsaac in Neighborhood Learning Alliance and Kathryn Vargas in United Way of Allegheny County. When talking with Stephen, he told us about how to encourage high school students to work hard to prepare for their future profession, and he also introduced one program he is doing. In this program, the high school students would be employed and trained by the alliance to teach elementary students reading books. For high school students, they get the experience about teaching, and for young children, they find a way to read the books what they like. So this program is good for both young children and high school teenagers. I think this program inspires us to think more about how to find a good program to help a large range of age students meanwhile and let them engage the program. When talking with Kathryn, she gave us more information about the after school program in the large Pittsburgh area and we would attend the activity the Afterschool Symposiumshe next Tuesday which is introduced by her. We plan to talk with more students who attend or don’t attend after school program in Pittsburgh.
2. Knowledge Mining: For our project, I think the people who are uniquely qualified to offer insights are Nina Meria Barbuto, Stephen MacIsaac as Executive Director at Neighborhood Learning Alliance, Wendy Etheridge Smith as Executive Director at Higher Achievement Pittsburgh, Kathryn Vargas as Manager in Programs for Children and Youth at present. And after we talk with them, we would collect more informations about more after school programs and then talk with more people.
3. Guided Storytelling: We plan to listen to teachers, volunteers working at after school program telling what they are doing during work time and what is their unforgettable experience staying with children at after school program. And for the second part, we would ask children to tell us whether they remember the happiest time in the program.
4. Guide Tour: For this method, it is a good way that teachers or volunteers lead us to visit their courses and activities.
5. Beeper Study: To realize it, I want to provide small forms for teachers to record what contents induce children’s interest.
6. Photo Diary: It is a good way to collect data that asking teachers or volunteers in the after school program to take pictures for their activities. For more details, the pictures are required to be special to record specific moment such as the time children use some new tools and they express their curiosity. And during the guide tour, we could also take some pictures under the permission of teachers.
7. Prototype Evaluation: After finishing the lo-fi prototypes, we should come back to the after school programs and conduct experiments with teachers, volunteers, staff and children. Without knowing the concept of our project, we need know what parts of our project confuse them and where we should improve.
8. Think Aloud Protocol: With the lo-fi or hi-fi prototypes, when conducting the user testing, we should give a task to them and when they try to finish it, ask them to say what they are thinking. Especially for children, it is a little difficult to know what they are thinking, so recording the process seems important if we get the permission.
9. Shadowing: After interviewing with enough directors, managers, teachers and students, we would pick up some specific people as our main target audience and let them show their normal daily activities during after school time. This step is important to collect detailed data in ethnography.
10. Fly on the Wall: Sitting in the after school place, and watching the activities.
11. Video Observation: As mentioned in the method 8, we would record what children do under permission, and for teachers, if necessary, recording a video is essential.
12. Task Analysis: The method is visualizing the process of the after school activities.
13. Draw Your Experience: We have made 2 posters for each participates, one is for adults and one is for children. On the adult’s poster, there is one question “what do you want to do if you can live your childhood once more time”. We provide several hints such as activities, memory, favorites and so on. And for the children’s poster, the question is “draw your favorite place, thing or activity”. We want to children drawing whatever they feel happy and interested.
As a student focus on design part in the team, I would try more on how to promote our project more efficiently, provide a clear system for conducting research on people and visualize the ideas, process and results.
There is another useful toolkit for user research.
http://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit/
Design and Policy 