Tutorial notes – 13/03/13

In today’s tutorial Dr Sandra Wilson, my adviser and me discusses my focus on people who have multiple identities. Sandra shows me several good examples of multiple identities such as About.me, one website works as online business card which combines user’s information from different networks, Heath Bunting’s workshop about new legal identity, her colleague’s experience of travel to another country and use different identities for documents and accounts.

The main suggestion of my future research is to try to find more about multiple identities such as how to describe them, what are the keywords of different identities, what are the features and how many different identities one person may have? Based on these, I will…

• Continue my own IMPRINTS diary based on the first one, and try to find more information about multiple identities I mentioned above.
• Also, I will try to explore both the positive and negative aspects of multi-identities during the research.

 

Analysis of my own IMPRINTS diary

For better understanding user experience relates to identity management, I have kept my own IMPRINTS diary for ten days( from Feb 28th to March 9th) to see my own experience of personal identity management issues.

Here are something I find from my experience:

1) I need to get access to emails, blog, social network platforms like Weibo(Chinese Twitter), WeChat(mobile phone text and voice messaging communication service) and some other online accounts like Pocket, Google Reader very often everyday. Therefore I tend to save all accounts and passwords in my devices( laptop, ipad and mobile phone) to save time.

2) I have habit to read short information online(Weibo, Google Reader and emails) during fragment time such as while waiting for the bus or on bus.

3) I don’t like to do repetitive work for security, such as input door password of studio every time and log in-log out and delete all operation trace on public computers(in library or studio).

4) Synchronization service always makes me happy& satisfied.

5) Sometimes I have more problems of whether I’ve registered one platform and the account than forgetting passwords.

6) Often get confused of the websites policies- Why they ask me for that information? What that information uses for?

7) The online services develop faster than devices, such as my HTC mobile phone( low-profile) is not smart enough for my frequent and diversity need to get access to networks, my iPad is too old( iPad 1) to update some apps and my laptop has not enough space for running more programs.

8) It’s very difficult for me to understand some security and privacy notices from the devices.

9) If the organizer takes photos during the event, I will always go to its facebook or blog later to check is there any of my pictures?- Care my public image.

10) Easy to feel annoyed if I’ve spend lots of time dealing with identity management problems( update profiles, find back passwords and etc.).

It’s very interesting to reread my own IMPRINTS diary and find the above feedback from my experience dealing with identity management issues. Some of the problems I mentioned above are those I actually didn’t notice before.

I’ve spread three more IMPRINTS diaries to my classmates and the next step is waiting for the collection of those diaries and try to find some new patterns from others records and compare those to mine.

User research- IDM Diary keeping

From Feb.28 I started my own IDM diary, it is one approach to help me figure out what issues relates to identity management I will face and also it’s a prototype for offering better diary template for other users in the future.

Six days later, I’m glad to find one small notebook is obvious not enough for my IDM diary. And from the contents inside, some experiences attract me more- those which make me really confused why the system is like that and those which make me nervous and worried about my online privacy.

Today the IDM diary exercise moves forward more: I create prototype 2.0 of the IDM diary and find three people help me keep it. The time will be one week and after that I will have a good resource to compare different user experiences and try to find some pattern from it.

It begins with an basic introduction of the diary and the next page is emoticon stickers (inspired by Life Calendar) and an example from my own experience of keeping diary.

 

 

Tutorial notes – 27/02/13

Tutorial Agenda:

• Introduce the last two-weeks work I’ve done since the last tutorial (Mind-map explanation, introduction of the blog structure) and ask for opinion;
• Discuss time-plan of the project: Gantt chart;
• Co-stakeholder mapping;
• Discuss the next research step (user interview methods & topics).

Notes of the tutorial:

• Not just the security aspect, but the pleasurable and design-able aspect of identity management could be considered;
• Focus on “Big Data”  may be a good topic;

(Book “The human face of big data”)

• Focus on individual’s perspective of Big Data is different from organizations’ and governments’ analysis of people’s data;
• The research could start from my own diary of identity management interaction in 10 days (every single time when I need to sign for someplace and information of who owns the data )- then a map may be drew of the IDM experience and it begins to give me insights of personal control of their own data.;
• Decisions of the project process may come naturally when we keep talking about it every two weeks; the delivery form depends on the final concept; and the plan need to be flexible;
• Value pyramid might be good exercise with people (with two or three example post-its), the interview could start with classmates in the Master studios.

Next step:

• Start to keep my own diary of identity management interaction for 10 days from Feb.28 to March.9;

• Plan and do value pyramid exercise with people;
• Keep case studies and literature reading and move slightly to the topic of Big Data;
• Improve the stakeholder map for the next tutorial (we haven’t done today because of the limited time);
• Be interviewed by design ethnography students and exchange knowledge- they are having a project of Big Data and self-tracking.