Tagging Exercise & Target Group
Carnival Del Pueblo, Burgess Park, Elephant & Castle 07.08.05
For the purposes of our user centred development and user testing, we chose to work with one specific community, to focus on how they might use the application influence development.
We chose Latin Americans in London as our target group as there is a large Latin community in Elephant & Castle, and members of our team are native Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese speakers.
Before we could test our proposed product, we needed content to include in the database. We wanted to have real and relevant content, in order to demonstrate the application realistically, and to put our concept and premise to the test – Would people want to ‘tag’ their environment? What kinds of places would they choose to tag? What messages would they leave? What language, slang or terminology would they use? And how would their input affect the development of data fields within the product database?
We conducted a ‘tagging’ exercise, in English and Spanish at the ‘Carnival Del Pueblo’, in Burgess Park. We asked people to name places in the area that are relevant to their community, and assign these places with a primary keyword, then secondary keywords, a description, and an image they would associate the place with.
Peoples’ responses showed that they were happy to share places of importance to them, even though they were doing it ‘off the top of their heads’ they could think of several key places. Some places such as the restaurant ‘La Bodeguita’ were mentioned frequently by people from many different places including Bolivia, Columbia, and Ecuador. More unexpected results included ‘Continental Links’ a money transfer shop, but tagged with the keywords ‘meeting-place’ by a Bolivian participant, as the shop is well located in Bolivia so many people use it. This also reflects the aspect of our many people in our target groups lifestyle, of coming here to work and sending money back home.
We collected a lot of primary data, which revealed many places in the area that are significant to the community, why they’re significant, and what language, terminology and imagery people associate with the places. It not only provided data for the application and future testing scenarios, but also an insight into our target groups lifestyles and interests.
Click here to view the table for the TAGGING exercise