I almost ditched the topic of my thesis because I was afraid to be drowned in empirical research organisations. I was fearing beeing too busy with running from school to school interviewing children or teenagers about their political opinions or awareness. After my talk with Mrs. Ursula Lagger she gave me the hint that I dont have to focus on empirical research in terms of interviewing people myself. Unlike my bachelor thesis, I can totally focus on my design work and don’t have to have a certain amount of people interviewed in a qualitative or quantitative way. So that gave me confidence of beeing able to focus on an iterative approach to a well designed and user centered concept.
In the following i’d like to describe my approach to this thesis i discussed with Mrs. Lagger. First i’d like to gain an overview of all the necessary material thats already there. Such as papers, statistics and articles about the awareness of younger people towards democracy in Austria. Since i’d like to do some user testings and fill a hole in the spectrum of information channels for younger people i’d like to focus on austrian user groups. Even logistically its more easy for me especially when it comes to qualitative interviews or actual focus group testings. After gaining that overview I have to sort and subdivide the content in order to be able to structure my ongoing process. I’ll probably have to look through a lot of literature in the field of sociology and political sciences rather than actual design related papers.
After that I’d like to start my design process with defining a problem and analyzing it to see whats beyond the obvious. Then I’d like to build up a portfolio of solutions so to say in order to interview experts of certain fields to gain more knowledge of which way to go to be as user or teenager-centered as possible. Using various design tools or methods will help me to point out a final solution for my problem. Afterwards I will move from low-fidelity prototypes to highfidelity ones. All and all in an iterative process.
To be able to think more of how to subdivide and look through the existing content in order to focus on actual user experience design is calming me a lot and motivates me at the same time to develop a tool with an actual positive purpose.
