Academic thesis

The post-graduate research project that produced the Jeopardy Analysis Method (JAM) was motivated by a desire to understand why well-funded teams of talented engineers still delivered systems that had serious flaws in them. A full answer to that is still a research question, but if the reasons included a reluctance to anticipate problems, or an over reliance on testing with limited coverage, then an exploration of design discovery practice seemed a good starting point.

Beginning with an exploration of current practice, workshops and interviews were conducted with UX practitioners. The data from the workshops focussed on what the aims of a good discovery activity were, what people would like to be doing, and what got in the way. The interviews gathered more detailed information on what organisations did to share their understanding of the user needs, how projects were started and who drove that mobilisation to action, and what role anticipation had in their discovery process, if any. The interview transcripts were analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. The themes constructed in that analysis were then used as input to the design of the method.

A doctoral thesis is a strange document. It serves as both a description of a piece of academic research, and an artefact for summative assessment of the research student. The former needs to be detailed enough to understand the work and its findings, but the latter needs to meet the needs of the examiners and be concise enough to fit within their workload. That tension can result in some much needed context and background thinking being left out.

Thesis for practitioners

These pages are a version of the academic thesis. The text has been expanded where needed to better explain the ideas to an interested practitioner, and pruned of material that was only relevant for examination purposes. All the diagrams have been reworked from the LaTeX originals into a more web friendly form and their accessibility improved. The introductory chapter has been completely rewritten and is much longer, because the journey from interaction discovery as a general concept to something that can be done early in the design process is a more winding path than the academic thesis had room for.

What is Interaction Discovery?

Interaction discovery is a term used in the pharmaceutical industry to describe the process of finding unwanted interactions with other drugs, or other harmful side effects. It is adopted here as a general description of all the ways we might try to identify unwanted interactions between software and its users, or with other software, or between the users themselves. Jeopardy analysis is a user centred way of doing that.

What is an Ethical Property

The ethical property that engineers are most familiar with is safety, and whole professions exist to establish and assess it. Other whole-system properties are important enough that the law demands them, such as equity and proportionality, or are associated with particular circumstances, such as dignity in healthcare. Constructing journey maps for different experiences of a design, centred on these properties, is general enough to use early in the design process, and refinable enough to build into detailed service blueprints.