Needfinding

Overview

Our needfinding method consists of surveys and interviews. One survey will be conducted community-wide in the beginning to determine the need for Minerva as well as what functions would we want to include. Afterwards in our user study phase we be using a post-presentation experience survey get immediate thoughts on their experience and then an interview at the very end to summarize up their thoughts.

The first phase deals more with determining if Minerva is something worth pursuing in the first place, and the second phase deals with Minerva's effectiveness and what steps we need to take next to refine Minerva. Below you will find the results of our community-wide survey, while in our evaluation section you can find the post-experience survey and interview.

Community-Wide Survey

We conducted a survey amongst the community we are most familiar with - college students. College students are a group more inclined to come in contact with more technical STEM presentations in their day-to-day lives, and they're popular audience members to have at these types of presentations.

The purpose of the survey is to get a better sense of whether or not the community would benefit from something like Minerva or whether they need it in the first place. Most of the questions are to get a sense of whether or not people have issues keeping up when attending STEM lectures/presentations and if so, what impacts their experience negatively? What could impact their experience positively? Adding on we also had a few questions to get a sense of who was replying to our survey to make sure that answers weren't from too specific a demographic and to get more context as to why they may answer the way they do.

Our survey was conducted via Google Forms as it's a platform that many easily recognize and are familiar with using. We distributed this survey through people we knew, groups we were involved in, and having those people in turn distribute the survey. This way it would hopefully result in a more diverse pool of responses. In the end, we received 24 responses.

Data

Conclusions

The results from the survey should that there was in fact a need for assistance when it comes to STEM presentations. Our sampling was fairly diverse so it should allow for our collected data to be more well-rounded.

While there wasn't any significant number of people who felt they had trouble understanding in general, the results were fairly well distributed across the board when asked if they agreed or not with the statement, which just means that there is a need but it may vary depending on the context.

In terms of more specifically any issues that people would come across, this was where most of the important results came from.

Our initial suspicions were confirmed. The length of lectures and minimal past understanding of topics were some of the main points brought up when asked if there were barriers to their enjoyment or understanding of the topic. Something we didn't initially account for that was brought up more than once was actually ADHD being a barrier. Regardless, when designing the concept of Minerva, it was with the intention of addressing many of these matters and even with ADHD, the way Minerva is meant to assist with additional information could in turn help in cases like that as well. The resources brought up were ones already considered when first designing Minerva with aspects such as having easy access to Wikipedia and having related articles.

All in all, Minerva is something that would be beneficial and could address concerns that were brought up in the survey. People do experience trouble keeping up with and understanding technical STEM presentations, and there are resources that Minerva intends on including that they would benefit from.