Don+Mills+User+Study

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=**User Study Observations and Interviews**=

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Initial Plan
For our User Study, we already had several possible contacts as one of us lives in the neighbourhood. As we didn't require a huge number of participants, we wanted to get a range of people to look at different perspectives. Because of the demographics of the area, we knew that senior citizens would be a prime group to interview. Students were also high up on this list and easy to get interviews with as Alex knows a few current (and many former) students. We also needed to meet up to tour the area as Carol had never been to Don Mills before. We planned to look at all the main sites and hopefully meet some new people who might be able to help with our research.

**Photos**
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**Initial Questions Considered**
How long have you lived in Don Mills?/ Why do you come to Don Mills? What do you want out of a communitiy? What do you like about your community? What do you define as you community (geographically, socially)? What is the size of the community? How are you involved in your community? How often are you involved in community activities? Or attend community events? What improvements have you seen in community practices? How do you think your community could improve? Do you like your community? Why do you like it? Do you know many people in your neighbourhood? Do you like your neighbours? Could you share a story about living in “insert community name”? What events are going on/going to happen in your community right now? How did you know about these events?

Would you like to know more about community events? What would be the easiest way for you to access this information? Who do you feel represents your community? How would you describe people in your community? Who/What represents your community? How much time have you spent in the centre? What do you do there? Where do you get resources? Where do you prefer? Why? (Food) How do you get your information? Source of information? (Library? Newspaper? Internet? TV?)

How do you feel about green practices? What do you know about green practices and green design?

Observations
Just as our User Study is meant to provide different perspectives, we bring our own perspectives to this project. These include the points of view of the long term resident and the first time visitor, which brings a range of different observations on the area we felt was important in our entire study of the area of Don Mills. This also helped us think about preconceptions and first impressions that might not always be so accurate. In the below links we included our own blogged experience of the process of executing the user study and our observations of what it was like to tour the community in the roles of tour guide and visitor.

Alex's Observations Carol's Observations

Interviews
Our selection of participants involved trying to get a range of different people who have experienced the community, mainly concentrating members of the community who would be the ones to mainly benefit from an interactive project designed specifically for the area. Because of recent changes in the community, namely the new Shops at Don Mills which attempts to use events at the complex to get the community out, we got participants who would also have experienced both centres, those being the previous indoor shopping mall, and the new outdoor complex. Follow the link below to get the notes from the interview for our User Study.

on to Interviews

Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Videos | PACT Analysis | User Study | Requirements | Visualization