Tools to COLLECT information
Showcase: Inspiration & Assessment Cards
Abstract
IA Cards are a collection of hundreds of visual attractive cards, which are used for inspiration and assessment. The cards are divided in different sets with different themessuch as people, animals, products, consumables, environments, abstract images and textures. The sets are composed based on three overall aspects: ambiguity, variety and aesthetics. The cards are relatively small (slightly smaller than credit cards) which make them easy to handle, shuffle and move. This is beneficial during individual sessions, as well as group sessions. The cards can be used in combination with a game board, paper reply forms (designed for different questions and purposes) or with post-its. In general, when using the cards one generally tries to answer a question, e.g., “Who are you?” or “How do you experience the interaction with a product X?” or “What kind of experience should the new product evoke?” “If the library is changing from a physical institute to a virtual knowledge centre, sketch your ideal library”. They do so by selecting several images (which can be a fixed number of cards or an unlimited selection), and adding a keyword to every image. Finally, an overall explanation is be added.
Tools in this category
Context Mapping Tool Suite
The contextmapping tool suite (CMTS) was developed to streamline the process of participatory user studies using generative techniques, analysing the results and sharing these with designers in the stages of idea generation and concept definition. With these techniques, users, researchers, and designers share visual-creative tools to express user needs, and present the findings in ways that support idea generation.
Cultural Probes
Cultural probes are a research method that can help collect information on cultural and social issues from a wide variety of people. The probes are seemingly, sometimes, incomprehensible tasks or questions that participants complete, which have no right or wrong answer.
Emofaces
Instead of relying on the use of words, respondents can report their emotions with the use of cartoon drawings of facial expressions. The Emofaces can be used in internet surveys, formal interviews, and in qualitative interviews.
Inspiration & Assessment Cards
IA Cards try to evoke people to talk, think and feel about subjects intuitively, creatively, personally and passionately, by using a large set of images. The cards incite people to tell their personal story, where the cards function as a catalyst and do not have a univocal meaning. It is the person using the cards that creates the story and determines it’s meaning for him or her. The amount, diversity and ambiguity of the cards trigger the imagination of a person. Leonardo da Vinci pointed out that “confused things rouse the mind to new inventions” [Gombrich, 1966]. With these confused things he referred to the ambiguous character of sketches, but it is also applicable to the ambiguous character of the IA-Cards.
Product Attachment Scale
The Product Attachment scale provides a quantitative measure of the strength of the emotional bond a person experiences to a product during ownership. The scale can be used in questionnaires. People’s scores on the scale represent how attached they are to their product. Higher scores suggest the presence of stronger emotional bonds.
SEGIT
The set of tools are subjective psychological exploration and projection techniques for characterising user experience in a deep and detailed way; to be used as a set of inspirational, concept generation and evaluation tools to design user’s experience. The aim is to provide guidance/ideas of means of assessing user experience and ways of analysing the complex area of users’ individual and subjective experience in the users’ own words, to help designers obtain a correct understanding of users’ requirements.
Sensitizing Packages
A sensitizing package is a design-oriented research toolkit that is based on self-documentation. (see also cultural probes)
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