Individual assignment 1

My feeling about the three methods of evaluation was that they each capture a unique angle of the product and user's relation to it. I think that each of them are good for different stages of the process. Also choosing one, will depend on what we want to capture with conducting the test.


Evaluating symbolic meaning can be a good method for evaluating or rethinking a complete product or an existing one. It kind of belongs to the very last stages of design and development. Actually it may be better to say that it belongs to a higher level of abstraction. It captures symbolic meaning of the product, user's emotion and association to it as a whole. This method will give a general overview of the meaning associated to the product but does not contribute to the usability or other similar fine grain and low level features.
The specific method used for capturing symbolic meaning facilitates communication between user and experimenter and eases the hard task of putting the conceptual meanings into words.  


Evaluating early product concepts through Anticipated eXperience Evaluation (AXE) approach on the other hand goes a level deeper in the details and tries to evaluate concepts by means of their representation in the product(for example with using an early prototype). I think that this method can be used even in the details of implementation such as menus or features.
This method is useful for early stages of design and development and although it is possible to conduct this evaluation with the concepts, the presentation of a concept to participants inevitably determines the feedback one can obtain in an evaluation session. for this reason a prototype will be a better medium for doing it.

The method used in this paper, using image as a medium and asking questions, makes communication and interpretation of the thoughts easier for both user and designer.

Comparative research is a very practical functional type of evaluation. Unlike the two first methods it does not try to capture very high level concepts or meanings. But it starts from functionality and implementation and may go to the deeper levels. It also different from the last two in the way it looks into the evaluation process. It does not only focus on your product but it compares you with your potential competitors. Although the paper suggest that comparative evaluation should be carried out in regular basis, it seems very useful while conceptualising a potential product. This makes it a very good candidate for our project in current stage.


What I will choose and why..
I think I will start with comparative research to get ideas about possible direction that we can choose to continue. and will defiantly evaluate early product concept before going too much into implementation. In my opinion symbolic meaning evaluation can be done after the product is in the market and has been used with fair amount of users.