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- Value Pyramid- practice

In these two days, I talked with several people from university and public spaces of Dundee about their personal identity management issues. 15 of them took the practice of Value Pyramid with me, which helps me a lot for my project research.

During this “talking with exercises”, I observed people of how they sequence elements of IDM, noticed their questions about IDM and the first responses of IDM, found out what people thought most important and less, and talked with them about their opinions of IDM in their daily lives. I think Value Pyramid is a good method to help get people’s priority of IDM issues and also an easy and understandable topic for people to talk and think.

After the practice, I collected all the results from people’s different value pyramids. Then I made one paper ruler with the same dimension of the pyramid shape. From the number of the ruler, I calculated the average scores of the six elements of IDM I provided and put them into one total form:

I provided five basic choices of IDM elements and most people agree with these options:Accessibility, concise, privacy, security, and user-friendly. From the result of Value Pyramid Ruler, “Security” and “Privacy” is obvious the highest and their scores are quite close. Then scores of “User-friendly”, “Concise” and “Accessible” are very close and have a certain distance from the two highest options.

In addition, I made a mindmap from the notes taken during talking with people:

From both the quantitative and qualitative research aspects, I find that most people consider security and privacy as most important elements of their identity management issues; and according to the talking with people, they mentioned that they start to face more problems with identity management, more controls of their identity management and tracking are needed, and they have different levels of security& privacy need depending on scenarios.