Approaches and Methodology

E 4 Approaches and Methodology

The research methodologies aim in locating the variables to study the factors of Information Architecture (IA) influencing User Centered Design (UCD) to enrich User Experience (UX) and to provide basic information about the aspect of research finding and guideline for the project proposal. In this respect many diverse methodologies are needed to develop sound and timely answers to the questions that were proposed in the questionnaire (Assessment task 1 in ITRM-32931). The proposal highlights two methods, which use structured interview techniques, such as phone based interview and a web survey, which would be exercised to gather data to endorse the research findings towards developing the variables for the project. These methodologies will incorporate structured interview techniques. This section describes the approaches for collating data by conducting interviews and performing a web based survey using Structured Interviewing Techniques to get detailed information for the research proposal (The General Accounting Office - USA, 1991).

A structured interview uses data-collection instruments (DCIs), as it requires the same or uniform information. The information collated by telephone or web survey in structured interview, where participants are asked same questions and the in turn the participants select same set of possible responses, can be organized, interpreted , compared and analyzed easily later. The target populations for the study are professionals dealing in marketing, IA, web/mobile site designing and building web/mobile applications within organizations. These are people engaging in user experience design. The participants for the study shall be sourced from networking organization and associations such as Mobile Monday (MoMo) Global and Sydney, IA peers and Usability Professionals’ association by approaching in person or forwarding e-mails or visiting the UTS web site or other social networking sites such as twitter.com or linkedin.com having notifications and links to the web survey. So, these means will be used to distribute the questionnaire. For the research study the telephone based interview and the web survey shall be conducted concurrently, as in that event the respondents have adequate time to fill the web survey and can respond to the questions in the web survey as per their convenience and be sensitive to the answers that they provide and also the individuals participating in the interview are not rushed and can be contacted as per their convenience. However, participants will need to respond either to a telephone interview or to a web survey and there shall not be any duplication of their responses. The purpose of conducting dual modes of investigation is to gather responses from Australia, mainly through telephone based interview, and from professionals in the industry in the other parts of world such as the UK, the USA, Japan and some parts of Asia via the web based survey.

The telephone based structured interview are more successful with participants as spoken words or sentences are easy to understand than written ones. The telephone interview enables the interviewer to establish rapport with the respondents. The interview can succinctly clarify the question to the participant and get an answer without jeopardizing the integrity of the interview. An Internet (web) based survey incorporating a structured interview is beneficial as web based survey are organized, inexpensive, do not cost anything to the respondent, the respondents can take the survey at leisure and choose to answer methodically. The labor needed to administer these is very low and less but the expertise needed to construct them is high, so that later the analysis to be done becomes simple. As the participants are busy, so, through web based survey they can answer the queries as per their convenience as well as be sensitive towards the answers. Moreover a web based survey is considered optimum, when capturing data is from specific section of population. Also the web based survey yields more data and information as compared to telephonic interview. In short Internet based surveys are cost effective, have more responses and convenient to the participants (Cobanoglu, Warde & Moreo, 2001, pp 407-408).

The main advantage of telephone interviewing from the researcher point of view is people can be reached in a relatively short period of time. And from the respondents standpoint it would eliminate any discomfort that some of them would feel less uncomfortable disclosing personal information over the phone than face to face. A main disadvantage of telephone interviewing is that the respondent could unilaterally terminate the interview without warning or explanation, by hanging up the phone (blurtit, 2007). The main advantage of web based survey compared to any paper survey would be the higher speed and response rates of participants (surveyspro, 2009). The disadvantage in web based survey would be the need to remind people to take the survey, so that their responses could be collated in time.

The structured interview questions can be categorized as descriptive, normative or impact (cause-and-effect). Descriptive question describe information about specific conditions of a situation, while a normative question compares between an expected and observed outcome. An impact (cause-and-effect) question aims to determine whether observed outcomes can be recognized as outputs of situations. In the research proposal the approaches and methodology of web survey (sample survey) and Interview (phone based) will collect data from a sample to determine the distribution, and relationship of events and conditions.

The structured interview techniques focus on information collection. And information obtained from the participants in the sample can be analyzed properly. Thus, mostly structured interviews are used along with statistical sampling. This combination provides data that can be used to make projections about the entire population from which the sample was drawn. The questions in the structured interview are interrelated and iterative, as the aim of the proposal, selection of the method for collection of information and exploring an analysis plan to examine the collected information are related. Thus, the use of structured interviewing to collect information is not an isolated task, unrelated to or independent of other tasks, and cannot be thought of as a sequential task either.

In the proposal the sample survey constructed will follow a stratified sampling technique because the participants are divided into different sections based on the type of profession they are engaged in the organization. For the purpose of coherent analysis the population is divided into people, who are professionals in IA, and web/mobile site designers and web/mobile application engineers. The data collected shall be classified as categorical data based on ordinal and shall be interpreted using pie graphs. The research proposal shall use the statistical techniques to measure central tendency and dispersion. The data collected will be fed into SPSS software package for analysis purposes.

The approaches and methodology and timeframe for the research proposal are summarized in the table below: -

	Telephone based interview	web based survey
Timeframe	2 months	3 Months
Objective	Qualitative data collection	Qualitative data collection
Process	In depth structured interviews	In depth structured interviews
Number of participants	5	50