Update on project activities:
For the BAC User Testing team, Romuald and Sarah have received responses from some of the community members we reached out to, and now we have eight interested interviewees! This is very good news for our project, but a very large and sudden increase in our workload. We have done some preparation for these interviewees; six of them are Spanish speakers, so two new unBox members with Spanish language fluency have joined our interview team to help us make sure we conduct the more effective and professional interviews that we can. We’ve translated our protocol document and consent form to Spanish and will be scheduling interviews in Weeks 8 and 9 of the quarter. For the BAC Content team, Wesley and Kei have continued to wrangle with unBox’s database in order to validate sites of public free food distribution. We have become familiar with the setup of the database, but it is pretty easy to get bogged down with messy data. As a result, data validation for free food distribution has taken longer than expected. However, we met with our point person, Charlie, to clarify edge cases and minute details about our work. Furthermore, we outlined a plan for the next steps to gather data on other food resources like CalFresh and WIC (both SNAP supplemental programs). The SNAP interview team has completed their second interview after making some adjustments to their preliminary questions on the heels of their first interview. The interview benefited from this adjustment and we were able to block out a good portion of time for the online user feedback. We are further adjusting our interview for future iterations based on some new content we have received from our team in the form of alternative user guides. We will incorporate user feedback on a condensed pamphlet and an executive summary into the lattermost part of our interview. What we observed and learned: The BAC User Testing team has learned a couple of things: one, that the pace at which we had anticipated receiving interest from interviewees was not one we predicted or planned for accurately. Our timeline of progress will need some serious tweaking; we may have been overly ambitious in the beginning, so it’s beneficial for us to revisit that timeline and revise our expectations! Two, not all of our skills can be utilized in all of the same ways, or on all of the same projects. For example, Romuald will take the lead on our two English interviews as a result of his lack of Spanish skills, and Sarah will merely be a note-taker in the Spanish interviews as a result of her proficient-but-not-fluent skill level. While this feels like a burdensome distribution of workload for the native Spanish-speakers on our team, our unBox partners have encouraged this in an effort to put interviewer comfort and confidence first. We’ve been taught that users will be more open to speak their minds (and we, thus, will receive more authentic feedback on our resource!) if they know the interviewer is a competent and comprehending individual. What started out feeling like a disappointment for the Sustainable Cities team is actually an exercise in community accommodation and respect. In working with the data, the BAC Content team has in a sense gotten a taste of some the issues social workers face as they track down information for their clients. Namely, many sites of free food distribution are constantly changing so it’s hard to stay up to date on the most current information. COVID has further complicated it as many food distribution sites opened up temporarily, but either moved to a new location or shut down. It is valuable insight to have for building BAC, which is mainly aimed at helping social workers. The SNAP interview team found that making small but fundamental adjustments to our interviewing process opened up a lot more time and continuity in the interview. There are still adjustments that should be made with the notetaker in mind. The interview was originally structured under the assumption we would be recording, and modifying the process for note-taking is important to our data collection. We also face a similar challenge as the BAC interview team in terms of a possible native-Spanish speaking interviewee. We are conscious of this issue as creating a larger work load for our unBox team in supporting the influx of BAC interviews, and are actively searching for possible solutions reaching into our own networks for suitable support. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward: Next steps for the BAC User Testing team will involve transcribing and collating findings from our eight interviews. Throughout this process, we hope to rely more on our unBox partners from guidance and recommendations for how these deliverables could be more thorough or helpful. For the most part, our partners are students and volunteers like us, but they have been managing this organization longer and more deftly than we have. For this reason, we hope to ask for and incorporate their feedback on our portions of the project, and to not get carried away when they let us take the lead on certain deliverables. The next steps for the BAC Content team is to wrap up the validation of free food distribution sites. From there, we have outlined a plan to gather data on two resources that are both SNAP programs: CalFresh and WIC. The goal is to provide information on BAC so that people can register with these two resources. In essence, it is like making BAC a one-stop shop for food resources so that it is not only a directory of food distribution sites but encompasses all the ways in which someone could find food. The plan involves identifying the best method for data collection, whether this be web-scraping their sites or manually building a spreadsheet. Once we have done some more research on the two programs, we can proceed to collect data accordingly. Finally, we also look forward to our group members’ interviews and will do our best to sit in on them when possible! The SNAP interview team is excited to incorporate the new documents into their last iteration of interviews. The pamphlet and executive summary are an acknowledgement of the differing needs of the SNAP online user base and we think incorporating these will help us capture more nuanced feedback in terms of what is missing, in excess for our, as well as to provide more full-spectrum online support for SNAP participants. We are also actively searching for new interviewees and hope to find four more participants before completing the interview process. Comments are closed.
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