ENGR $1182$

Assignment PD$0-$ Practice Interview: Uncovering User Pains

Overview.

To clearly identify an avenue for impactful engineering design, it is key to understand our "users", their daily experiences, and the pains they encounter when performing various tasks. A task can be functional, social, emotional, it can be a process, a specific action, it can be short, long, it can be anything a "user" does to achieve a goal. When analyzing our users' experiences performing various tasks, we must uncover the components that are frustrating, time$-$consuming, expensive, inefficient, or otherwise unpleasant. These are known as pain points and represent areas for improvement. Resolution of these pain points will lead to value creation and positive outcomes for the user, known as gains.

Requirements.

This assignment will help clarify the terms introduced in class and give you an opportunity to uncover potential problems for a user. You will conduct an interview with a potential user to discover some pain points they experience while performing various tasks. Once teams are assigned, you will share your individual results of this assignment to brainstorm together to identify a focus of your semester$-$long design project.

Conduct an Interview. Find someone you know personally and have an interest in helping as your interviewee. Try to choose someone who is dissimilar to you $($age group, background, experiences, etc.$).$ Then, conduct an interview using the script on the next page as a guide. Remember! We are not yet looking for solutions, only uncovering problems $($tasks & pains$).$

NOTE: This script is only a guide and a starting point to help you achieve the primary goal of uncovering user pains $-$ if an interviewee goes into depth about a problematic task early on$,$ you should not break discussion flow just to ask every question on the script. Additionally, you may reword any of the questions based on who you are interviewing $($for instance when speaking with a child, it wouldn't be appropriate to ask what they do for a living, but instead maybe ask what grade they are in or what their favorite subject is$).$

You should take detailed notes of the interviewee's responses during the interview and include this in the appendix of your report.

Narrative. After completing the interview, create a written narrative in paragraph form to summarize the interview process and your findings. This discussion should include:

A description of your user$/$interviewee $($DO NOT use full names or photos$)$

Summary of the interview $($what was discussed, how did it go$,$ would you do anything differently next time?$)$

A bulleted list of at least $2$ tasks and $3-5$ associated pains that you uncovered in the interview $($example below$)$

The user for this example is an elderly woman who lives alone.

Task: Opening canned food

Pains:

It can be extremely painful to grasp the lid and turn at the same time.

It is difficult to keep the jar stationary while turning the lid.

It is often necessary to ask someone else to open the jar.

Task: Driving after an ice$/$snowstorm

Pains:

It is difficult and exhausting to shovel driveway

There is a risk of getting injured by slipping or overexertion

The user's glasses fog up in the cold making it hard to see