Brain dump of some idea that came out of today's meeting:

Iterations?

Is there a way to try doing iterations of user research? Focus first round on a smaller set of attributes and then expand to another round maybe each release? The difficult aspect would remain determining the scope and attributes for each round of user research.

Self Report Ideas

Survey's
- Qualitative
- Templates for creating models, workflows & the such.
Models and assumptions presented to users to react to
Diaries - this may be tough since working with content happens throughout the day. I've read a lot about these but don't have any personal experience. Anyone else?

Opportunities

Users are part of our communities
Getting the data is fairly low overhead for us (as opposed to having 2 designers sit with each user for 1 1/2 hours)
Users want to participate in making our applications better. At the Sakai conference, there were several faculty asking how they can get more involved.

Challenges

Self reporting challenges:
- Experts have a hard time describing exactly what they do. So much becomes internalized. Research shows that some of the most important processing happens almost subconsciously once a person becomes expert.
- Don Norman quote: ""...And actually, the thing I really work on is asking the right questions, so the rule I have for myself when I consult with clients and the rule I teach my students, is: Do not solve the problem that's asked of you. It's almost always the wrong problem. Almost always when somebody comes to you with a problem, they're really telling you the symptoms and the first and the most difficult part of design is to figure out what is really needed to get to the root of the issue and solve the correct problem..."
- Many people aren't great at getting to goals and instead focus on tasks. This is a similar problem to what Don Norman describes above with problems. In fact, when talking to users I often ask "why" or "what do you mean" 2 or 3 times around the same topic to guide the user into getting at the root of it all.
Raw data is not very useful. It is always more difficult to make sense of mass amounts of data if you weren't doing the collecting.

Overhead of coordination and sense making after the fact. Think qualitative survey if you've ever tried to analyze those results.

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