Making decision to tailor the scope

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     We decided to focus on different types of commuters from the campus into three main groups, bike commuters, bus commuters, and car commuters. We did this so that we could focus on students who have to commute into campus, not just around campus. The people we chose to interview as stakeholders are a bus driver, since they spend most of their shifts observing commuting students and can provide input on the commuting process, and the parents of a commuting student, to learn how they feel about their student commuting into classes. The representative users we interviewed are two bus riders, a biker, and a car commuter. These users gave us an overview of how students in their representative categories felt about the commuting process. When it came to doing observations, we spent some time observing Lot One, one of the main commuter lots. We thought this would be a good place to observe parking since it is frequently crowded. In addition, we observed the Stamp Student Union bus stop. This is the most central bus stop on campus and allowed us to observe the students who commute in from further locations, such as the Gaithersburg bus.

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     Process of preparation for interviewing and observation

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The preparation process involved identifying the parties (stakeholders and users) to be interviewed, creating engaging questions that would retrieve helpful and informative answers, and contacting the stakeholders for interviewing. We drafted our questions with the intent of keeping them open ended to encourage interviewees to answer more freely. This allowed interviewees to give us answers to our questions that were more true to form and revealed what they wanted us to know. During our observation process, we thought about appropriate times to conduct these interviews so that our interviewees had the right amount of time to answer our questions without having something rushing them. Interviews were conducted using different methods. One method, for users who didn’t or weren’t able to meet with us was to send questions via email and have them send their responses back. While we didn’t get to gauge their reactions using body language, we are maintaining contact with them and will potentially be able to get further information from them in person. The other method for interviewing was in person. This allowed us to get more personal, less formal answers to our questions.

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