| USER STUDIES |
User Research
Digital media and technology are omnipresent and play an increasingly important role in people’s everyday lives and activities (at home, at work and in public spaces). The traditional media and telecommunication landscape of one-way broadcasting and two-way personal communication turns into a digitized, converged interactive ecosystem including mass self-communication. Within this changing digital society users can be empowered as well as disempowered.
The traditional approaches often come short to fully understand user (dis)empowerment and to meet the challenges of the user-centric need of today’s innovations in society and economy. Hence SMIT aims to transcend the limitations of these approaches, and to evolve towards user research that enables optimal understanding of user empowerment and that furthers truly user-centric innovation developments, in the application domains of future internet, future media and digital arts. Therefore SMIT applies a range of different methods focusing on user adoption, diffusion, experience, practices and domestication processes.
In our user research we always follow an intertwined and 3-staged approach in which we explore:
• The future usage scenario’s and social requirements by using co-creation and participatory design techniques
• The determinants for market introduction, adoption and diffusion aspects, such as targeting, profiling, price setting etc
• The evaluation of the change and stability of daily routines and practices with ICT (professional, home and leisure use)
o Current technologies
o Prototypes and/or proxy technologies enabling new applications and services.
This research is done by applying a varied toolbox of methods such as design ethnography, in-depth interviews, diary studies, living lab, creative sessions….
By using these techniques in both product developments as evaluation we are able to capture practices, experiences and expectations on a more tacit or latent level of everyday life.
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