User Research Findings

When creating my research protocol I unfortunately made the mistake of confusing my users with the subject of my project which was federal government employees. As a result I decided to change the focus of my proposed topic from comparing federal employees of different sectors, to a more general concept of the impact of history as it relates to the current federal workplace. After having corrected this, I revised my user end interview questions to reflect a much broader audience consisting not only of federal government workers, but students, museum professionals, and anyone generally interested in the history of the United States. Despite these changes, the subjects I interviewed still had a bit of difficulty providing answers to the more open ended questions such as “Has the federal government used history more or less over time?” I realize that this is most likely due to the vague nature of the question itself rather than the subjects understanding of the relationship between the government and historical projects. However, this made me rethink the premise of my project and weather or not it was actually appropriate or specific enough to dedicate a digital project to, and I may change it again entirely.