Pattern Design

Now we're getting somewhere. After all, the title of the URECA project was design for a mobile digital lifestyle. Not to say that what went before wasn't important, it served to highlight the fact that a proper pattern design is probably essential if MDS is to take off.

What exactly is pattern design then?
Having no idea, my only resource was the IBM red book and probably google. Fortunately, the IBM red book was pretty enlightening despite being extremely long. That coupled with the pattern language questionnaire has enable me to interpret pattern language design as being such, at least for the consumer point of view:

Pattern Language Design refers to a way of designing such that clearly recognisable symbols which are interpreted intuitively are built into the interface. For example, the "trash" icon is interpreted as deletion of an item.

So, how exactly do we create a properly designed pattern language?
And, will such a pattern language be useful in the business sense?
Those will be the focus of my next few posts...

Limitations of Pilot Studies

Alright they're pilot studies and not supposed to be as strict as experiments.However, I realised that my previous posts did not really discuss any weaknesses of these studies which will have to be improved upon if proper experiments are to be performed.

Blogging
The data it yielded is sorely in need of interpretation. A scale of some sort is needed if any SPSS or statistical procedures are to be implemented. Respondents tended to confuse the cost of obtaining info with the cost of using the information. e.g. Cost of finding out where to eat was recorded as the price of their meal, not the cost of asking their friends. To make things clearer, perhaps an additional column which seperates the two would be appropriate.

Focus Groups
While yielding valuable information, the focus groups were confined to a restricted group of people. Managers, IT professionals and MBA students more likely than not are more familiar with MDS than the rest of the population. If the target were limited to these groups of people, the market might not be large enough to support MDS.
Design should be intuitive (from OoBE) such that any person off the streets including ah bengs/lians, aunties, uncles etc should be able to use the device without hassle.

Pilot Study #2 - Focus Groups and Linkage

Again utilizing available resources, Focus groups were conducted by students as part of their B6554 module. Groups surveyed included MBA students, IT Professionals, Managers etc.
This pilot study turned up what seemed to be a totally different set of data, but its potential to contribute to overall research was evident.

Excerpt (From the same paper)

"focus groups were conducted to find out more about mobile device usage. From the data, only 45% of respondents used their mobile devices for functions other than voice and SMS. However, most respondents were receptive to Location Based Services (LBS). Among the different categories of respondents, it was surprisingly the MBA students with the supposedly lowest purchasing power who demanded and were most willing to pay for mobile data services. In fact, there was a negative relationship between purchasing power and willingness to pay for mobile data services."

So, having two sets of data, what was left was to tie them together.
Firstly, mobile data services are not user-friendly.
Secondly, there IS a market for mobile services (provided they can be tailored to users, hence LBS)
Thirdly, a possible negative relationship.
These three led to the next step - Pattern Design (Which will be discussed soon)

Pilot Study #1 - Blogging

Research can sometimes be a very messy process. If not sure where to start, anywhere would be a good place. Often, a researcher has to use any and all available sources available to him. Also, I learnt that it is often best to have a pilot study before commencing an experiment. At least this might give some indication as whether the research was on the correct track (if any at all). Over the 2 weekends in December for B6554, I had the opportunity to access the data from two different pilot experiments. While not directly useful, such information will probably be valuable when the time comes.

Pilot Study #1 - Blog
Members of the B6554 class were asked to capture their informational needs on a blog. What I didn't realise when reading the instructions for the first time was that this exercise had a dual purpose. Purpose 1 was as a start to their mobile business plan project, and purpose 2 was to yield more data in research. As can probably be predicted, the instructions yielded a large quantity of data. (The pros and cons of this method of data gathering have already been discussed in some of my other postings, I think.)

When collated, the large jumble of data sorted itself to reveal exactly that - a large jumble of seemingly incoherent data. The class was then divided into 4 groups and tasked to segment the writers of the blogs. When the 4 groups came up with 4 different ways of segmentation, it was clear that data will just be data. How it translates into useful information is a matter of which pair of lenses you use to view it.

Anyway, from the data, here are the main findings which have been taken from the paper (An OoBE-based Design Perspective on Sentient Computing) which Prof Lee has recently submitted as part of introducing me to the publication process (I'll discuss that in another post):

"In this study conducted among NTU MBA students, respondents were asked to capture their informational needs over a 48 hour period and post it in an online blog. What the data revealed was that internet news was the most accessed by this group of people (55%) followed by hard copy (19%). This suggests that people are not averse to obtaining information electronically. However news via mobile devices received a 0% rating. Respondents mostly felt that news was too troublesome and confusing to check on their mobile devices, further emphasizing the need for proper pattern usage in the context of mobile data services."