Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Demetrius Madrigal

Demetrius Madrigal — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:02:38 GMT

Good article. I’d been wondering for quite some time how research was performed on games considering the fun factor. It sets a great precedent for future research in games, especially how successful Spore has been. It was also great to hear that EA was willing to commit to such a costly research commitment.

Demetrius Madrigal — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:05:00 GMT

Great article. It can be frustrating when some people fail to recognize that your participants are your customers and how valuable their feedback is. Like some people mentioned, I always try to build a rapport with participants, make them feel comfortable and talking freely. Sometimes having a bunch of observers around during a session can put a participant on edge, the moderator’s job is to work around that and make the participant feel comfortable regardless. That being said, the moderator also has to work around the participant’s desire to please the moderator.

When it comes to recruiting, I truly believe that behavior is what really counts and getting to that is part of how the screener is written. In the cases in which the researcher can’t do the recruiting him or herself, it’s important to work with the recruiter closely, write the screener with open-ended questions targeting specific key behaviors as well as close-ended demographics questions, and go over the research goals, participant criteria and screener questions with the recruiter. Once you have a good relationship with a goor recruiter, it really makes your life easy.

Demetrius Madrigal — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:29:46 GMT

Interesting article, I liked reading your take on collaboration and it’s directions. I’d love to see your model expanded with your sports-team metaphor applied as a way of providing an example. Another piece of software that you might consider taking a look at is Microsoft’s Office Groove: (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/HA101656331033.a…). I haven’t used it, but I know that it’s goal is to provide a single shared collaborative workspace.

There are a couple things I’d like to see added to your description of ideal collaboration software. The first regards the role of the team leader. A leader has to be able to keep tabs on his or her team members and ensure progress, I think any good collaboration software should include this. My designed some communication software for search and rescue teams a few years back and teams really appreciated the ability for the team leader to be able to keep tabs on all his people from a single source.

The second focuses on training. In my personal experience some of the most collaborative teams include football teams, hostage negotiation teams, and military units from companies down to fire teams. One thing that all of these teams have in common is that they train together regularly. As a result, they really understand their team members, their habits and their capabilities very well. I would like to see some kind of training feature in a which the team can work together to accomplish some kind of mini-task on some kind of regular or semi-regular basis. I feel like the biggest hurdle to effective collaboration is behavioral, it can be hard to get people that are not accustomed to collaborating to do it regularly and well. I’d love to see collaboration software address the behavioral piece.

Demetrius Madrigal — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:43:16 GMT

Matthew: Good point on the leadership aspect, for this application I was thinking about the role of the project manager and how they can get overloaded quickly. Collaboration definitely requires coordination and transparency would be very useful in that regard. I have a lot of interest in this topic, I recently saw Kim Goodwin from Cooper describing their team model during a talk and it was very compelling, it might be interesting to see what she would look for in a piece of software. Understanding the work of your teammates is a major hurdle also, I recently proposed an article on this site intended to help people understand research (my specialty) in the interest of better collaboration.

Demetrius Madrigal — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:43:09 GMT

The article doesn’t necessarily outline everything that researchers need to know about working with non-researchers, but there is an element of that involved. In my professional career, I’ve worked hard to discover the needs, expectations, and preferences of the “users” of my product, which in my case would be designers. I’ve thought about writing something for researchers discussing methods and priorities for people that are getting started in this field. For example, the importance of meeting a schedule and the consequences that it can have for the well-being of the product. I’ll definitely keep that in mind for a possible followup.

Demetrius Madrigal — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:43:58 GMT

Hello, I submitted this idea a little over a month ago and haven’t had any response from Boxes and Arrows editors about whether they intend to use the article. I haven’t found any way to contact any editors to ask them these questions. I was wondering if someone at B+A could contact me and let me know if they were planning to use it at some time. Thanks.

Demetrius Madrigal — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:26:18 GMT

Thanks for the response Chris, I wasn’t sure of how the process worked. In this context, the researcher is anyone that is performing the research (designers included) and the non-researchers would be the engineers, other designers, marketing people and other stake holders that do not have experience with research and, as a result, don’t know what kind of logistics are involved. An example is the amount of time needed for recruitment. Someone that doesn’t have any research experience might not be prepared for the length of time that it takes to line up good participants. This article can help someone with little research experience understand the time and resources that are need to perform research.

Demetrius Madrigal — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:45:43 GMT

Sounds like a great article, although you might want to think about giving a short definition of proxemics, I’m not sure that everyone is familiar with it.

Demetrius Madrigal — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:38:09 GMT

I’m glad that you found it useful Mark. I was hoping that it would provide a useful reference even for those that were aware of the research process to help inform those that they work with.