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Tutorial 8

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#8 - Working With and Analyzing Qualitative Data


David A. Siegel, Ph.D
Dray & Associates
2007 Kenwood Parkway
Minneapolis, MN 55405 USA
david.siegel@acm.org

Susan M. Dray, Ph.D., CHFP
Dray & Associates
2007 Kenwood Parkway
Minneapolis, MN 55405 USA
dray@acm.org

In this tutorial, we will cover:
  • Characteristics of qualitative research that drive how we should handle the data
  • Proactive strategies to make sure qualitative research is useful for design
  • How to maintain scientific rigor when working with qualitative data
  • Ways to manage data collection to make it accessible and facilitate analysis
  • Techniques and software tools for recording data and exploring patterns
  • In what sense can one “generalize” from qualitative research
  • Strategies for getting the results into the design process
Qualitative research, whether in the form of field studies or exploratory usability studies, or interview methods, is essential to user-centered design. Unfortunately, qualitative data is often overwhelming in volume and ambiguity. Without a disciplined process of analysis, we are subject to many kinds of errors of inference. In practice, conclusions are often impressionistic or anecdotal, with vague or even misleading implications for design. For these reasons, practitioners and researchers need proactive, effective, and practical strategies to manage the processes of collecting, archiving, and analyzing qualitative data to ensure that they are not simply overwhelmed by it, to enable them to evaluate the validity of findings, and to make sure that findings are truly useful in design.
This tutorial will focus on teaching practical strategies to apply during data collection and analysis. Although inspired by the challenges of qualitative data from contextual field studies, the skills taught are equally applicable to other types of qualitative data, such as that from exploratory usability testing, interviews, etc.

Numerous offerings at various recent HCI conferences have focused on the role of qualitative research in user-centered design. For example, several recent tutorials have focused on how to carry out various types of ethnographic field studies, and on their importance for user-centered design. In contrast, there has been relatively little emphasis placed on analysis of field research data and the application of the results of the research to design. In fact, there has been a tendency to assume that simple immersion in the data will be sufficient to produce “design insights.” However,
practitioners quickly discover that the challenges of making sense of a mountain of field notes, artifacts, photos, and audio and video recordings are immense. The difficulties of managing this data, and following a disciplined process to extract valid meaning and practical design guidance from qualitative data, require specific, well-thought out strategies. The need for these strategies is becoming greater as ethnographic field research becomes more common in HCI.

This intermediate to advanced tutorial is for people who want to increase their skill in applying qualitative data, such as that from field studies, in the real world of design.  It is intended for people with some experience in usability, software development and design, fieldwork and observation of users, or other user experience research.  It would also be useful for people planning new projects in these areas.