Summary and Setup
User Experience Research (UXR) is an essential part of improving how software works for the people that use it. The ‘User Experience’ is the subjective experience in which humans interact, understand and manipulate information and interfaces. Research is investigating and interpreting those experiences of the users, from their own perspectives and then applying those learnings to the software to make it work well for the people using it. People all use software in different ways, with different intentions and purposes at different paces. Learning how to do UX Research helps creators of software to think outside their own experiences and include those of a wide range of users.
There might be new terminology or new ways that words and terms are used in these lessons. Please refer to the Glossary which contains words and their meaning in the context of software design.
Prerequisites
To successfully complete this workshop you will need:
- Digital or physical place to take notes and write documents.
- (Optional) Your own scientific software to focus your work on in a ‘repository’ or location where you can write information.
- (Optional) a spreadsheet creation and maintenance software or another way to store, label and categorise qualitative and quantitative data.
This lesson does not require any technology or software.
FIXME: Setup instructions live in this document. Please specify the tools and the data sets the Learner needs to have installed.
Data Sets
Download the data zip file and unzip it to your Desktop
Software Setup
Details
Setup for different systems can be presented in dropdown menus via a
spoiler tag. They will join to this discussion block, so
you can give a general overview of the software used in this lesson here
and fill out the individual operating systems (and potentially add more,
e.g. online setup) in the solutions blocks.
Use PuTTY
Use Terminal.app
Use Terminal