User expereince dreams and realities

Hello everyone,

Sorry for no post. Although it seems I m the only one reading my own blog at present but I m sure there will be a day when people will remember this blog. I m kidding.

So to start with, I am a little apprehensive of releasing too many details on this blog about the project progress. For many reasons, we had a issue with the human subject office in the month of November and as a result of it, we decided to play safe for some time. We have eventually decided to return to blogging with very careful selection of what would be posted online. First update we completed 16 interviews with parents over last fall. Secondly we started a follow up with parents to have a quantitative aspect of the diet the kids are having on everyday basis. We are using the USDA my pyramid tracker. Very user friendly tool. This diet analysis is commonly referred to as 24 hour diet recall, however in our study we have added the physical activity aspect to this data to ensure we have complete data and not have to go back to the end users i.e. parents again and again. Now I can’t reveal the results of the quantitative data analysis here online but if you are interested please send me a e-mail with the request and I can consider the request. Just to clarify for quantitative these are again the same 16 parents we used for qualitative data collection.  Last update we submitted a research paper for the CHI 2010 student research competition with the work in progress report of the qualitative data. Some other details of the project can also be viewed at my newly updated website. We are now approaching the design phase and are expected to finalize the design within a week’s time. It’s has been a great journey on this project, right from user research to the design. Feels good to be in charge of the entire process.

Thanks for your time.

Secondary research is very much going on . I realized senator from Iowa is a big advocate of prevention of disease. Encouraging. HSC papers( IRB) were filed and we were sent a review report for revision of documents. The documents were revised and sent along with the interview script in one hour from the time I received e-mail about revisions recommended by IRB officials. I should be having the approvals by Tuesday. Then hunt for 30 parents will start. Hopefully I get participants.

This week we made some progress to look at some websites for basic secondary research. One of the websites was the US government disease prevention center website . One of the interesting figures related to Indiana was the three points in the state wise comparison of Indiana with other states. This fact has given me encouragement that we are approaching a good design challenge. The IRB papers also have been filed on Friday i.e. yesterday 10/16/09. The documentation went well, took all night to prepare the 6 page document. It is interesting that when I started writing the documentation for IRB I started getting a hint of some of the issues I may face with the IRB approvals. For those of you who may not be aware what IRB means, it is a organization in every university which makes sure that every researcher follows a proper guidelines in order to maintain a respect level for the participants helping the researchers.  I have positive and negative comments about the IRB process but for the time being I will wait for the approvals. Which may take another 3 to 4 weeks.Finally today is Diwali. I appreciate presidents Obama greetings for all the people around the world who celebrate Diwali. President Obama Diwali message (HD)

I hope the people around the world have a safe and prosperous year. May peace prevail. Recently I was reading a UN report about 1 billion people going hungry around the world. I pray to god that one day I get to help at least some of these one billion people in some way. God bless them.

So I am going to start talking why I started with the project related to the vision of prevention of disease. I had the opportunity of visiting Canada this summer to my grandfather’s house. My grandfather came to Canada around 40 years back as a doctor. He has been very successful. He has been engaged for the last 10 years  in various welfare works related to canadian and Indian society. His family roots lying in India and canada being his home he has served both the societies equally. He is Dr Shiv Jindal. In middle of the much heated debate related to the reforms being debated at Washington presently and in summer. So there came the fact of the lack of emphasis on prevention of disease rather than curing the disease. Long story short this project would be emphasizing on primary prevention of disease. Therefore young school children would be the emphasis of this project. I will blog soon about some other rationales behind the project. The IRB approvals will be filed soon. I have to introduce the faculty sponsor for this project, Kay Connelly. I am grateful to her her resources and time for the project. More blogs will follow.

Hello Friends,

Thought of writing my first blog post for my master thesis project( also called capstone). I would go about explaining some intricate details and also some reason’s behind this topic and my journey all together in the future posts. Till then enjoy!!!! The project title is to use design to prevent diabetes.

Target user group

Children in elementary schools and parents

Description

The word disease has been defined as a abnormal condition in human body associated with symptoms. An individual often associates medicines as a means to prevent disease. This project aims to use design as a tool to help parents having kids in elementary schools to be a part of the bigger vision to prevent disease rather than completely relying on medicines or other form of medical help. This project intends to be a one of the chapter towards the bigger vision towards the prevention of disease using designerly methods. One of the diseases which have been observed to be a reason of concern in American household has been diabetes. Every disease is associated with certain risk factors which make an individual prone towards a disease. These risk factors start right from the childhood and eventually result in the body being infected with a disease which may or may not be curable. Likewise Diabetes has obesity as a prominent risk factor amongst other risk factors in families residing in U.S.A. Researchers have emphasized that reduction in the physical activity is also seen as one of the cause for the rapidly rising cases related to obesity in school children. As a part of our user research we would aim to narrow our focus to the problems parents face in encouraging physical activity in their children going to elementary schools. This user research will inform our design thinking and help us to come to a concept which will be addressing the issue reduction of obesity levels in society by encouraging physical activity in elementary school kids and families on the whole. We intend this concept to be beneficial for the entire families with emphasis on their kids in elementary school. The entire families would be a involved in this concept, however the user research would focus on parents as they head the family and have to be very well informed about any decision regarding their children and family in general. This concept is emphasizing on elementary school children as research has shown that this age group in elementary schools are undergoing a phase of life wherein they would be learning to have a judgment between good and bad. We would therefore like to have the message of prevention of disease as a part of their learning process in this phase of life.

Importance

The present education system in U.S.A. is not adequately equipped at elementary school level to follow the vision of prevention of disease by following healthy practices in terms of dietary habits and physical activity. Also as design researchers we did not feel the need of burdening the existing school system with an extra task of emphasizing on healthy habits for school children. Moreover the school meal systems have been designed in a way which ensures healthy diet for the children. Therefore with the help of this project we aim to pass the responsibility maintaining healthy family towards the parents. A house environment also has many uncontrolled factors which provide fodder for this design challenge. Schools on the other hand are having a very controlled environment and thus offer less fodder for the design thinking. Therefore the set-up of this concept would be in American households and not the school systems. On a long run if the vision is directionalized in the proper direction we envision that the present healthcare system in U.S.A. can save valuable money presently spent on curing diseases by spending considerably less on the prevention of disease. The project having the focus towards the American household could possible help to strengthen the concept of having meal together with the entire family which has scientifically been a very healthy practice.

Predispositions and assumptions

1. The schools have a controlled environment.
2. The home provides an uncontrolled environment.
3. Diabetes can be prevented at early stage with the help of proper intervention in form of healthy practices.

Preliminary plan

1. The first stage would involve collecting raw data to understand the environment related to American households. This could possibly involve a contextual enquiry/ethnographic observations/dairy studies.
2. The second stage would involve a focus group constituting parents (possible both mother and father). We are presently planning two focus groups.
3. A data analysis and consolidation would be performed in the third stage.
4. The fourth stage would involve coming up with design ideas. (First iteration).
5. The fifth stage would involve user testing these design ideas.
6. The sixth stage would involve incorporating the recommendations to make a final design and making strategies for future implementation.
7. Possibly more user testing and redesigning if time permits in the seventh stage.
8. The last stage would involve the final documentation.

Prototype

We plan to have a paper prototype during the first iteration for the user testing followed by a paper prototype for the second user testing and possibly a final mock-up using one of the software prototyping tools.