The activities required to develop a master project can be affected by the restrictions introduced due to the corona virus outbreak (covid-19). Here we provide some guidelines useful to handle the master thesis process at IxD and GDT remotely.

For any questions, you may want to contact (in the order):

- your supervisor;

- the master thesis coordinator Josef Wideström (josef.widestrom@chalmers.se);

- the master program administrator Thommy Eriksson (thommy@chalmers.se).

Seminars, meetings and presentations

Regarding the thesis process at Chalmers/GU: We know that teaching in LP4 will happen remotely. Thus, we still have to decide how final thesis presentations will be performed and will inform you once there is more information. Until then: supervision meetings and half-time meetings can happen via Zoom or similar services.

Regarding your thesis work with company and practitioners, please discuss with your supervisor, to see whether your research will be affected by this. Supervisors should check whether students research plans are at risk, e.g. planned interviews cannot be performed anymore etc.

Work cards

When you have accomplished all the different parts of the master thesis course (attending presentations, opposing presentation and giving your own presentation), email the filled-in work card to the examiner - the examiner sends approved work cards to the student office.

Physical equipment

For students in need of physical equipment such as VR head sets: in some cases it could be solved by having students borrow equipment to their homes.

Students presence at a company and such

Students are not obliged to go to the company offices. Students shall talk with the mentor at the company/clinics and be ready to revise any constraints. Follow the instructions from the government and university, and stay home whenever possible.

Doing user research and user testing online

For master’s thesis students having problems performing their planned user tests due to the
current situation, these are some useful online tools:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/tools-remote-ux-workshops/

https://www.meetup.com/Business-Design-Goteborg/events/269488359/

https://mural.co/ebook

https://miro.com/

There are actually many things that can be done fully online if you are creative, and combine different tools
such as video meeting + collaborative work or co-designing in Google spread sheet, online collaborative mind-
maps, etc.

For projects requiring e.g. user testing with specific physical equipment such as VR head sets, then some of these will simply not be able to do their user tests. Others might possibly cobble together solutions by having user test VR in their own homes etc, but that is very time-consuming to arrange.

Thommy Eriksson have put together a list of students that have VR headsets available at home.

It is going to be difficult for masters students to pivot too hard from the methodologies they have already documented in their literature reviews. Every masters student can include a short section on "What we wish we'd planned differently due to Coronavirus" and then they just do the best with the techniques they're already working with.

This can be also discussed in the evaluation sections, e.g. "We had planned to do this, we were going to carry it out this way, but due to an unforeseen pandemic meant that we couldn't".

The robustness of your evaluation and the way in which you take lessons from will be taken in account. “What did you plan, why couldn't you do it, how did you recover from that and what would you do in future” - a good accounting of that seems like masters level self-evaluation.

Often, some kind of user testing can probably be done online; record a screen-cast of your GUI, let someone watch it online and give feedback.

We think it will be up to each supervisor to find a way to adjust methods and contents to the current
circumstances. We strongly encourage students to work according to the directions of the university, and national health institutes.

Consider converting prototype testing to design guidelines, based on interviews and literature reviews, or as interviews around suggested (but not tested) designs. Some things can be prototyped online and tested remotely.

A complement to user observations could be to ask users keep a diary over a time period, and use that as data.
Consent forms for interviews can be made with google forms or any suitably identifying route, as evidence
of valid consent. So, returned from an email address already linked to the person. Or through a Facebook
account, or something else like a text message if necessary.