What is Interaction Discovery?
Origins
The post-graduate research project that produced the Jeopardy Analysis Method (JAM) began as my attempt to understand why well-funded teams of talented engineers still delivered systems that had serious flaws in them. I still do not have a full answer to that, but part of the reason may be a reluctance to anticipate problems, and an over reliance on testing.
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. I have adopted it 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. I wanted a user centred way of doing that, and JAM is my initial attempt.
Beginning with an exploration of current practice, I conducted workshops and interviews 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 JAM.
