In this course, you're going to be doing a small user needs assessment. In order to do that, you'll be conducting interviews, observations, and performing data analysis. For this to make sense though, you're going to have to pick a single project that you're going to work on throughout the course. So, I want to give you some tips on how to choose that project. So, the qualities of a good project for this course are that, first of all, it should be about an existing product or service. You want a product or service that is used by at least a few people that you know, and for which you might suspect that there's some kind of challenge for the user. I'd like you to enroll at least two interview participants who are users of the product or service, and who are willing to be observed while they actually use the product. The other thing is that in order for this to be a meaningful exercise for you, I like it to be something that you are not already an expert in. So, for example, it shouldn't be something that you use all the time yourself, it shouldn't be something that you might already be a product manager for. You'd like to pick a project in which the product or service is something that you are at least a little bit unfamiliar with. The other challenge for choosing a mini-project is that it should have just the right kind of scope. You don't want it to be too large. You don't want it to be too small. It should be something that you'd expect to get reasonable insights in within the scope of about two hours of interviews with two different people. So, to give you an example of some different kinds of projects. For example, you wouldn't want to choose a project to redo the user interface for let's say, a jet airplane cockpit, nor would you want to do something that is about let's say a toilet, where users might not be too happy to have you observe them while you're using it. Of course, there are also plenty of products where the UI is really just too simple. You couldn't really expect to do an hour's worth of interviews with let's say a simple light switch. So, these aren't really great projects for you to propose for your own mini-project. So, let me give you an example of some of the different things that you could use. Consider for example a grocery store layout. Grocery store chains spend a lot of time trying to figure out where to put different products, and sometimes they're interested in understanding how users actually respond to those layouts. Now, you could consider the layout of the entire store, where the dairy products are, where the fruit is, where the cereal is, and so on. But that's a pretty large project to undertake. Another thing you might consider is the layout of the strawberries. But that would, I would say it's probably too small. Again, you couldn't probably do an hour of interview with somebody just asking about their experience with shopping for strawberries. However, a reasonable size project would be to consider the layout of just the fruit section. There might be something about where they put the fruit in different ways, how do they arrange the organic fruit versus the fruit that's grown in a regular way, and trying to understand the differences to how users respond to that and what else they might be seeking in the fruit section is something that you probably could do with two hours of interview. So, the whole store is probably too big. Just looking at the strawberries is a too small, and just right is considering something about the fruit section and the layout of the fruit in that section. Let's take another example. This one is a little bit more involved with technology. So, Amazon's website presents a significant UI challenge. You could imagine that users have all kinds of needs when perusing Amazon's website, and they go through a lot of different kinds of steps in actually purchasing a single product. Again, the experience of the entire website is probably too big. The experience of one-click checkout is probably a little bit too small. After all, there's not that much more than clicking on that one button. However, you might want to consider the checkout process for Amazon because it presents a reasonable number of steps. You can again imagine interviewing users for about an hour and understanding exactly what it is that they would want out of the process, what else they're seeking, and maybe the points of frustration. So, this is a good size project for this course in doing a user needs assessment. To summarize what we've covered in module one, you've seen an introduction to user needs assessment, gotten an overview of qualitative research, and hopefully, you have a sense for the kind of project you want to choose to work on for this course. In upcoming videos, we'll talk about how to develop an interview protocol, how to conduct interviews, and ultimately, how to do the qualitative analysis of the interviews that you do conduct.
