my slides 9.2

Thanks for the comments and especially for the interview lead. It sounds so much better and convincing now. It will be used in the invitation for recruiting the interviewees.

We plan to interview approximately 10 people. So far we have 5 "friendly" people that we are planning to contact.

These are the contacts we have:

- Marko Ahtisaari, (Design)
- Anne Kaikkonen, (Usability)
- Harri Kiljander, (User Interface R&D Linux platform?)
- Anita Navaratnam, (Solutions marketing)
- Janne Jalkanen, (Head of Early Technology Validation)

If you have some additional suggestions for people that we definitely should interview, we would be more than happy to include them in our list.

Our plan is to start with Anita Navaratnam as a pilot interview as soon as possible. 

Thank you Virpi and Jaakko for the swift feedback.

We have now been refining the structure of the questions and also included Jaakko's proposals to the list.
In addition we have made the interview lead and a plan for analyzing the results.

We believe that the questions are on a good level now so that we can conduct a pilot interview if you don't have any further proposals for improvement.
We realize that the amount of questions is rather large and we acknowledge that during the interview we most likely have to adapt the questions to meet our time limits.

As we are planning to conduct the pilot interview after the workshop on Tuesday 9th of February, we will bring the signed NDAs to NRC.

Below the refined questions:

Responsibilities (orientating questions and a warm-up, meant to be run through quickly and in order to get a description of the development context)

- Define your unit's position inside Nokia. (Special area of responsibility?)
- Define your position inside your unit. (What is your special area or responsibility?)
- What kind of projects do you participate in?
- What are the main phases in product development? (From your standpoint)
- What process models are applied on those projects?
- At what stage(s) of the development process are you involved?
- Describe the types of processes/activities that are used in your projects?
- What are the other stakeholders that have a direct impact on your work (affiliated departments, persons, departments to report to...etc.)

Extras:
- Do you apply agile development process? (only for developers)


Decision-making and goal setting (Probing out possible limitations for the integration of UX processes)

- What's the process for decision-making?
- On what kind of aspects do you focus in decision-making?
- What impact do your decisions have on products and other projects (software    development vs. product development vs. service development)
- What development-related decisions you (your department/unit) can do by yourself and what things are given? (what are the limits of your decision-making?)
- Who is responsible for goal setting for the projects?
- On what kind of data are the goals built on?
- To what extent do you identify key problem/development areas of user experience/usability (a) by surveying users/consumers in general vs. (b) studying the strengths of competitors' products vis-a-vis your own ones specifically. (where applicable)


Evaluations

- What kind of evaluation methods do you perform on the products* the unit produces? (*products meaning here the kind of results the unit produces, which can be services, software, products, prototypes, etc.)
- What is the key information you are interested in (in relation to the previous question)?
- Are there any common goals set for all departments or units working in a related area to your unit?
- How do you monitor your achievements? (not meaning personal achievements)
- Are evaluations done inside the workgroup/unit or are personnel from some other unit needed?
        If inside the unit
        - Do you have a set procedure you follow for evaluating?
        - What are the specific methods you employ?
- How do you monitor the effects of your work on the final product?
- Does consumer feedback about a product soon after market launch get integrated into development of improved version of the product (in portfolio/versioning management)?


How designers/developers/marketers (in the business units) understand UX as a concept?

- Do you feel that there is a Nokia product that is regarded especially good or bad in the eyes of the user? Why?
- What kind of a role do the users play on your line of work?
- What information about the user do you consider relevant for your work?
- How are user-related issues discussed in your unit?
- Are you familiar with the term User Experience?   

Set for those familiar with the concept of UX

- What is your understanding of UX?
- How did you learn about UX?
- How long have you been aware of the term UX?   
- How do you feel about UX personally? (Do you consider UX as an add-on to usability?)
- How is UX considered in the goal settings of projects? If yes, are there any objectives for UX? Which things are/should be measured?
- Is UX important for your work?
       - if yes: how has it changed your way of working? (Do you already employ UX assessment?)
       - if no: why isn't it?   
- Which aspects of UX do you consider relevant for your work?
- To what extent can a special problem area of user experience/usability act as a key starting point of a new product development project at Nokia (or in your work)?
- Are you aware of Nokia's UX elements (Usability, Utility, Enjoyment, Social Value)?
- How do you manage consumers' expectations of the user experience of your products? (E.g. X is a feature where the consumer can/should expect a wow experience vs. Y is a basic hygiene feature that just needs to be in order even if we don't claim to provide any wow experience concerning Y)
- What kind of needs within the UX field do you have? If any?
- What are the situations UX knowledge could/should be used?
   
Extra
 
- is there a person you would recommend to us, whom we should interview? (e.g. in a situation where evaluations are not done inside the unit)
- Is there a suitable project we could participate in?



Data Analysis

The individual interviews will be conducted in pairs by UX tools researchers. The interviews will be audio recorded, if the interviewee agrees, and complemented by written notes. Subsequent to the interviews, relevant information will be filtered out and partially transcripted. The obtained data will be qualitatively and if applicable quantitatively analyzed.
The results of the analysis will be shared among the project members in the form of slides and a workshop presentation.



Interview lead:

Dear XY,

We have selected you as a potential interviewee in the context of the UX Tools (User Experience Tools) project.

UX Tools is a Nokia Research Center (NRC) funded project which is conducted in collaboration with Aalto University. The UX Tools project aims at creating a set of tools and methods to assist Nokia in integrating User Experience into development processes. From NRC side the responsible head of the project is Principal Scientist Virpi Roto.
The purpose of the interview is to gain an understanding of current Nokia product development processes and methods. We are especially interested in the assessment of user related issues and their impacts on the whole development field.

Topics to be covered will be responsibilities concerning product or service development, decisions factors, evaluation methodologies, goal definition and User Experience. The interview will take approximately 1-2 hours and will be conducted in English. You will be interviewed by either one or two UX Tools project researchers.

The results of the interview will be treated as confidential. The interviewers work under permission of Nokia and have signed a non-disclosure agreement.

If you are willing to participate we would kindly ask you to propose some dates that will suit you the best. If you have any questions please contact...xy

Thank you Virpi for the great comments and additions! I guess this is a good start for making use of this platform as a forum for discussions.

In the following I want to present my views on the matter and respond to some questions that came up:
 
Regarding the set of questions, they were generated in a rather brainstorming manner and do not claim to be either complete or thoroughly elaborated so that's why it is brilliant to have already some feedback. Some of the questions which are marked as <too wide> need certainly more focus and have to be regarded as a kind of lead question or topic that requires more focused follow-up questions. Therefore it is great to gather further comments and proposals for refining the questions the following days.

Concerning the decision making (which probably applies only to certain people we are going to interview) I hope that these questions can help us to better understand what kind of information is needed and relevant, not only from a UX perspective, in order to understand what role, weighting UX related issues might have  and how they could contribute to these decision making processes (also in respect to what kind of data/results we have to produce to meet those peoples needs).
The goal defintion part from my point of view is relevant from the integration perspective. If we want to integrate UX-Tools in a product development process I feel we also have to understand how and by whom (managment, marketing, R&D, design?) project specific goals are defined in order to integrate and derive UX specific targets to and from those descriptions.
The achievement part mainly refers to monitoring the effect of relevant decisions within the product development (which might become important from a UX perspective).

I fully agree that we have to focus and find out more about the product development processes itself in Nokia. Especially as an outsider it is hard to imagine what units are typically involved, how they collaborate and what kind of projects are treated in what way.
Some information however could prove to be useful already prior to the interviews (if available) in order to address the right persons, e.g if there is something like an organisational map to gain an overview about the individual stages a project has to pass in a product development lifecycle in Nokia?

This is our proposal for the agenda for Tuesday.

Place: NRC Ruoholahti Itämerenkatu 11-13

9:00-9:30
Coffee
NDAs

9:30-11:30
Personal views on UX: A short oral or audiovisual presentation about the understanding of UX and about points of special interest concerning UX. (15 mins each)

11:30-12:30
Lunch

12:30
Short presentation and discussion on the planned interviews

13:00-15:30
Workshopping: different perspectives, overall goals of the framework
Experi(m)ent(i)al "Provocative Affinity diagram"

Taik Research lab 8th floor

Start: 9:00
End: 12:00

Innopoli 2, Tekniikantie 14, 4th floor

Start: 9:00
End: 12:00

Approved project plan with updated start for UXX

Now available in the UXtools community: Virpi's slides on defining user experience

Mikael and me have just finished the attached project plan draft 1.0

Thanks Turkka for the comments. I updated the attached document to this point.

Interesting article dealing with UX from a user centred and organizational perspective

attached the latest draft 0.2

Hi,

I added my proposal for the project plan in the latest draft. Please comment what you think of it.

Lutz

attached draft 0.2 of the project plan.