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Concept

Goal: Enable people to do applied qualitative research on how and why people work for informing the design of products

No-goals:

  • Quantitative Methods (though I love to use them, too)
  • Be tied to a certain sub-school of design or product development methods: JTBD, Design Thinking…

Teaching and Philosophy

  • Examples are favored over definitions (which can be useful as well as obscuring, as explained by Popper).
  • I do not avoid personal from-experience input. However, I try not to argue from the perspective of authority but try to make it easy to understand why I would choose a certain approach.
  • Avoid appeals to true or right -findings,-needs etc. (“technical rationality”): I think these are not the focus of qualitative research, nor things that can be easily asserted in general.
  • This book assumes Reflective Practice as the mode of work.
  • Results should be traceable and plausible. Thus, a significant part of the text focuses on data analysis.

Styleguide

Macro

  • Personal: “I” when talking about experiences and suggestions, “you” to address the reader.
  • Simple style: Mostly active forms, frequent words favored over unusual terms (see Orwell’s Six Rules of writing )

Micro

Sections

  • The intro “What this chapter is about” should use gerunds and point to results, but not how to do things
  • The summary at the end of the chapter does not gerund and tells the solutions

Punctuation and formatting:

  • List items do not need to end with a full stop
  • Image captions should end with a full stop
  • If quotation marks are around a word or phrase, the full stop is places outside the quotations marks.

Words

  • Do not use abbreviations like e.g. or etc., write them fully
  • Write “preceeding” and “following” not “above” and “below” (different formats use different spaces, e.g. some eBook readers suggest a text going from left to right while browsers will render the text on a looooog page from top to bottom)

Images

  • Name: Chapternumber_chaptername_Imagename. If image used twice, reuse the first, do not copy the image.
  • Markdown syntax: ![image caption](images/01_chaptername_imagename){#imageId alt="image description"}

Contributing

You can contribute in the following ways:

  • Write a mail to dittrich.c.jan AT gmail DOT com and write your suggestions, mistakes found etc.
  • If you have a github account: File an issue on github
  • If you have a github account: Submit a pull request to the repo (just submit for correcting spelling, grammar, for larger content changes it makes sense to talk about them before)

Releases

  • Corrections in spelling mistakes, more terse sentences etc. are usually added and deployed quickly
  • Structural changes or added/changed content can take a bit of time. Usually, I work on them in a separate version a bit, which can also be shared for collaboration a so-called git branch

Tech-y stuff on building and git

This is a bit programmer-ish:

  • The tool used for converting the files into the website and other formats is pandoc.
  • If you do changes, commit the markdown (and other relevant files like possible images), but not the build index.html.
  • On *nix systems, you can use make html to create the website, make epub to create an epub, make odt to create a libreoffice file, which can be useful for working in a word processor or for using google docs or the like for collaboration.
  • The website version is served via github pages. The master branch is directly served online (no gh-pages branch)