During the years I've been in school, I've several times got the assignment to create, develop or design something for a user. The first task is always to do some data gathering, and the easy way out is to do a questionnaire in google form, or interviewed some people you meet in Nymble - and the result is never good enough to make any conclusions. By reading this literature I can see why.
We have mostly done web-based questionnaires, without any clear goals, no pilot-study and without any structure or planned design. We haven't had enough time to gather data and we haven't really thought about what we want to investigate. Therefore the responses haven't comed out as we wanted.
We have also done semi-structured interviews. Kind of. We have walked around with a few questions, asking random people. But since we, just as with the questionnaires, don't really have known what we're looking for, the result haven't been very successful.
Before reading the literature, I think we all knew the different ways to collect data, but not how to prepare the collection or what to think about. After reading all of this seems pretty obvious, but clearly, since we have failed before, it isn't.
How do we in this project gather data, that's useful, possible analyse and draw conclusions from with the resources available? Is it possible?
Some of the methods may seem obvious, but the devil is in the details of applying them. And there it is a matter of practice I think :-)
SvaraRadera