Clay Spinuzzi
ABSTRACT
Observational research has become an increasingly important tool in the technical communicator's toolkit as a way of analyzing audiences, discovering problems with current documentation systems, and envisioning alternate ways to design information. Whether it is used informally, in structured design methods, or in academic workplace studies, observational research is useful for technical communication. Yet collecting, managing, and analyzing data can be laborious, time-consuming, and hard to share among team members. Thus technical communicators sometimes avoid observational research in favor of interviews, focus groups, and usability testing -- methods that have their own strengths, but that are no substitute for observational research.In this presentation, I describe two projects in which I dealt with some of these barriers by using handheld PCs (a Handspring Visor and a Sharp Zaurus) as data collection, management, and analysis tools. Consolidating various techniques to a handheld PC -particularly on the data collection side -- leads to a number of benefits, including a reduction in laborious manual transcription; the easy transfer from raw data to research databases; the elimination of work in digitizing audio and photo data for archiving in a database; on-the-fly analysis of data anywhere, without the need for file cabinets, folders, or other bulky types of data storage; and easy sharing of data among team members. At the presentation's conclusion, I will describe how I plan to further develop this fruitful line of inquiry by developing a crossplatform qualitative research tool.
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Index Terms
- Using a handheld PC to collect and analyze observational data
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