It’s been awhile since my last post about my master thesis (about 3 months). It is not because nothing has happened during this time but rather that I at times forgot to do it and that I could not find the time required for making a new post. After all it is a lengthy process to prepare and write these long posts (this post have been a work in progress for about two weeks). That being said I also find it rewarding to write them as it forces me to put words to the current state of my master thesis 
Since the last post
When I wrote my last post I was in the process of writing the theory about stakeholder interviews and conducting the actual interviews. I have finished writing the theory and now need to finish the writing about my actual approach and the retrieved findings from the interviews.
In the meantime I have started the work on a brand new chapter about heuristic evaluations. Currently this new chapter is much more finished than the stakeholder chapter.
In order to perform this heuristic evaluation I have decided to involve four potential end users of the website which is in correspondence with the theory by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich that suggest having 3 to 5 evaluators for a heuristic evaluation (I am the fifth evaluator). These four people were all attending courses at both the day and evening school and therefore cover both of the customer audiences that Fokus Folkeoplysning addresses.
Currently I am working on describing the findings from this process of evaluating the website and I must say that these on the first glance seemed quite difficult to interpret. The main discovery during my approach was that the results gained in each session greatly depended on the background of the interviewees. For instance it turned out that some people that are new on using computers blamed their own experience whenever they faced issues while others were better at ignoring these issues. Nevertheless my approach of sitting next to the evaluators made it possible for me to interpret what issues the interviewees discovered even though they blamed themselves.
Even though I initially were quite sceptically about the outcome gained from each evaluation session I actually think that the outcome was quite extensive. It is just a question about getting all the found issues down onto the paper.
In order to achieve as many details from the evaluations I both took notes and recorded the sessions using a digital camera that was pointing at the computer screen. This made it easy for me to reconsider the sessions afterwards and get all the issues written down.
In order to facilitate the process of describing all the usability issues and grouping them I decided to go through each evaluation and write each issue down on a post-it (I used different colors for each interview). Afterwards I went through a short card sorting exercise on my own in order to group the found issues into reasonable groups that I could present in the master thesis.
I have planed that the chapter about heuristic evaluations should be presented before the stakeholder interviews chapter. The next step is therefore to finalize the stakeholder findings and to combine the findings of the stakeholder interviews and heuristic evaluations.
It is my belief that these two evaluations/interviews is a substantial part in the process of conducting the background investigations and in achieving knowledge about the background. Once I feel that the background evaluation is done I will move in the direction of being productive as I will focus much more on finding solutions. The exact process for this phase is not yet planned but I believe that I will find this phase much more interesting and I hope that I will be able to use workshops and card sorting in this process as I find these methods very interesting and motivating as already mentioned in my former post (Workshop about the future of the family).
All considered I am quite positive about the future of my master thesis. I have made a new time schedule that I find realistic – although I must say that I am a little busy.
The post image was taken in february when there were still snow and ice in Denmark.