DT4: Preparation for Week 2

Author:Javed Khan
Learning Line:Digital Transformation
Course:DT4: Data-driven Design
Week:2
Competencies:know (part of) the process of user-centered design
BoKS:4K1 – The student is familiar with user-centered design principles and processes and knows how to apply them in specific (business) contexts.
4K2 – The student understands how to elicit requirements for an AI & Data Science product.
Learning Goals:be able to analyze qualitative data

Introduction

After having conducted a semi-structured interview you have primarily gathered qualitative data (i.e. what your participants have told you). To be able to draw conclusions for designing AI systems you need to properly analyze the data. The goal of this workshop is to prepare you to properly analyze qualitative data.

By the end of this workshop you will have:
– conducted a thematic analysis

In Design Council’s “Double Diamond” model of the design process (Fig.1) the step of coming up with several creative ideas, would be partly the “Discover” part of the process and partly the “Define”part of the process. That is because by analyzing the interview data you are still discovering your participants and empathizing with them and partly defining what their context and needs are by creating themes out of the transcribed interviews.

Figure 1: Design Council’s “Double Diamond” model of the design process.

What to prepare before coming to class

Before coming to this week’s workshop you need to have (at the very least partly) transcribed the audio recordings of your interviews. Here is a useful flowchart to decide how to organize transcribing your audio files:

Figure 2: Flowchart to help you decide how to transcribe your audio files.

For more info on transcription, I would refer you to: https://medium.com/delve/how-to-get-research-interviews-transcribed-21d004e1aa9f and the academic article: Nascimento, Leandro da Silva, & Steinbruch, Fernanda Kalil. (2019). “The interviews were transcribed”, but how? Reflections on management research. RAUSP Management Journal, 54(4), 413-429. Epub December 13, 2019.https://dx.doi.org/10.1108/rausp-05-2019-0092

Exercise: conduct a thematic analysis based on your transcribed data

You will conduct this analysis as a group. To conduct the analysis you must have already printed your transcripts. Furthermore, you will need some post-it notes. The process, in a nutshell is to go through the transcripts, highlight and eventually cut excerpts (or alternatively write them in a post-it) and categorize these excerpts based on their meaning.

Find below two short videos of how-to conduct it:

Video 1: Short introduction to thematic analysis.
Video 2: A simple method for visually identifying strong vs. weak themes in qualitative data from user research.

For more details on thematic analysis, i would refer you to the academic article: Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. Download PDF. The following video is a presentation from the authors of that paper about thematic analysis:

Video 3: Thematic analysis – an introduction.

Good luck with discovering those hidden themes in your qualitative data!