[Sigia-l] IA for non-web based projects

[Donna Maurer]

On 13 May 2004 at 15:09, Peter VanDijck wrote:

> Sesame Street were famous for testing their shows on users (kids). They
> would play a show, and have a room full of kids watching. There were
> also toys in the room. They would then record, on a timeline, how many
> kids were watching the screen at any given point and how many kids were
> looking somewhere else, in order to measure interest. They then used
> that information to make changes to the show until they got a certain
> percentage of "attention".
> 
> I forgot which book described this.
> 
Wasn't this Gladwells "The Tipping Point?" (which I wanted to re-read when travelling 
this week and have lost - eek!) I think it also discussed Blues Clues, which was 
particularly interesting as one of the findings was that kids wanted to see it over and 
over, so they changed to a format where they repeated the same show for a week 
rather than a new episode each day...

Part of the IA-relevant discussion has been about whether film/advertising media do 
UCD in the early stages of the design process, rather than running focus groups or the 
above type of test toward the end of the process.

My gut feel, and this may be naïve and completely wrong, is that a lot of this is done 
through the response to other media/advertising. So rather than do what we (IA/ucd 
types) might do in the user research stage, 'they' analyse what worked well or badly in 
similar projects. With the volume of similar stuff that is churned out, this is probably 
quite a good form of user research, and is something that we will gradually be able to 
take more advantage of (maybe ;)

Donna





-- 
Donna Maurer
blog: http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/
work: http://steptwo.com.au/
AOL IM: maadmob