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.
This lesson does not require any specific technology or software but you can find some recommendations in the above prequisites. Much of this lesson is about exploring users, design and usability and understanding how to apply what you learn about design and from users to improvements and changes to your scientific/research open source software. You can find plenty of resources across the internet and beyond on how to learn about, and perform good usabilitya nd user experience research. The lesson content here, will be grounded in scietific and research related examples. As the curriculum progresses, we’ll explore some of the unique challenges that scientific/research open source software has in regards to design topics.
Data Sets
There are no data sets created currently for this lesson. If they are created, you will find them here.
Software Setup
Details
There are no unique set up requirements for different operating systems for this lesson. If this changes, you will find details here.