After careful consideration, our field research focused on three demographics: flight controllers, educators, and students.

Initially, our team was charged with designing a product that would appeal to the general public; however, our research had to be more targeted in order to for it to be conducted in a reasonable amount of time. To better understand the target demographics of potential users of ISS Live!, we attempted to better understand NASA's mission of education and split our research into three key demographic groups: NASA flight controllers, educators from schools and NASA, and students.

Students still represented a rather large demographic, so it was necessary to further pare down the definition into a more reasonable size for field research. Due to the complex nature of the data that would be presented, students would have to be at least in high school to fully understand the material. It was also determined that the most ideal students would be those still attempting to build their identity—ones who had not yet decided their careers and could be interested in a science-related one. We therefore focused our research of students on tenth and eleventh grade high school students and college freshmen.

To ensure the collection of valid data across several demographics within our targeted groups, we carefully selected research participants with a range of criteria. All groups were represented by a mix of male and female participants to minimize gender bias in the research.

Flight Controllers

We primarily researched flight controllers on the planning team at Johnson Space Center. To add a wider range of information to our research, we also conducted interviews with flight controllers working within other areas of NASA. These flight controllers represented a breadth of knowledge in our research ranging from the environmental systems of the space station to shuttle mission planning (a drastically different process from station planning).

Educators

For each high school visited by the team, one teacher was observed and interviewed. We focused primarily on teachers to observe different teaching styles of the same material. To ensure these teaching styles were not completely content-specific, one astronomy class was also observed.

Students

Special care was taken with students to ensure a diverse range of demographics were reached. Research with high school students took place in their school, so we developed criteria for selecting schools. Of the four schools visited, two were privately run and two were local public schools. Two of these schools were also lower-income schools within the city and two were higher income schools in the suburban Pittsburgh area. From each school, the students themselves were also selected based on predefined criteria.

To avoid any bias caused by only looking at students interested in space exploration, only 50% of students researched described themselves as primarily interested in math or science. The remainder of the students represented a wide variety of academic interests.

For practical reasons, all college freshmen were selected from the Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate student body. Similar to high school students, these students were selected based on their academic interest with two of them having a declared major in liberal arts and the other two in science or engineering. Each of these groups included one male student and one female student.

Space Enthusiasts

In addition to our three key groups, we took the opportunity to interview those interested in manned spaceflight to develop a richer understanding of what generated their enthusiasm for the field. These individuals were simply interviewed based on willingness and availability.

These individuals represented the whole gamut of space enthusiasts from a CNN space reporter to a digital effects guru in the film industry with a special passion for space exploration. Contact with many of these individuals came from chance encounters. Nonetheless, these interviews provided valuable discoveries into how space exploration reaches a wide variety of people in many different career paths.