The last two weeks our group continued working on post-inquiry design aspects. After the inquiries each interview group began working on work models that were pertinent the data obtained through the contextual inquiry process. Based on  the data collected from my interviewee, I helped produce flow, sequence, physical, and artifact work models. As a group we decided that, based on the initial data collected through interviews, a cultural model would not be pertinent to our design process and so this model was not included.

   After the models were created for each informant, the next step in our process was the interpretation session. Each interviewer took turns reading through his or her interview transcription while the other members of the group were involved in some other aspect of the process, such as note taking, flow modeling, or sequence modeling. I know that during the modeling of the informant that was part of my interview that I realized I had produced a very different flow model than the one that we as a group produced during the interpretation session. I was introduced to many aspects of the data that I had initially missed during the initial modeling process.

    Our last group meeting was started with work on the affinity diagram. Each interview group first produced the lowest-level important points from each interview transcription. We spent a lot of time organizing these low-level data aspects into different intial categories. The rest of the work on the affinity diagram was spent producing parent relationships within the hierarchy, and again, this took quite a lot of time.

     The last part of the meeting was spent working on our next in-class presentation. The main points of our design process were included along with all other pertinent information. As the quarter continues, I'm realizing that much more time is required where the group meets together as a whole to work on the design.

    During this last week, our group continued work on implementing various aspects of contextual design to our project. Last week we finished the affinity diagram and began working on the consolidated models. A consolidated flow model was created and was part of our presentation in class on Thursday. Meeting again this last week we finished the consolidated sequence model, which involved identifying common activities across interviewed users and consolidating these via abstract descriptions. Working on this consolidated model helped our group identify where certain problem issues, across all our users, lie. This enabled us as a group to start considering work re-design issues.

    After this we moved on to the visioning sessions. We started with a sort of central idea and built upon this, not deciding whether features were viable or not until the evaluation of our sessions. We started with a centralized vision because, considering our design project, there was only one basic type of implementation scheme that seemed worth building upon. The more free-form aspects of the visioning process, however, were implemented through group members adding different functionalities, etc. to the our centralized theme. During evaluation we weeded out aspects that were not based on the data gathered from the interviews.

 After the visioning and evalution, during which we decided exactly what features would be present as part of our first paper prototype, we began creating the actual prototype. Each member contributed to different aspects of the prototypes creation. At the beginning of this coming week our group plans on finalizing the paper prototype and conducting another round of contextual inquiries using the prototype. Before we actually use the prototype in our interviews we will first develop a general method for using the prototype in our interviews.

This week was spent finishing our paper prototype for use in the second round of our contextual inquiries. A T.A. visited our meeting group on Monday and helped us sort out some initial problems that he saw with our prototype and also helped us focus on the aspects of the model we should be focusing on using to draw out user data, i.e., to gather data that is pertinent to our design goals. Our group split into smaller groups (we made multiple copies of our prototype) and during the week each group conducted interviews from a subset of our initial user group, focusing or attention on those user's that would be most useful to data gathering.

During the interviews that I participated in, there were many interesting aspects of our prototype design that I had not anticipated would elicit discussion. Something as simple as having a different tab open by default when visiting the calendar was not something I had initially felt would be of much concern to our users. But, in fact, this was an aspect of one of our user's work flow that could not be over looked, since it drew attention/focus away from the tasks that he normally conducts. Perhaps, since not everyone (as we saw from the data) proceeds along identical sequences during a normal work process. This particular user wanted the to-do tab to be the default open tab, yet I could see how others would perhaps prefer the calendar tab open. The best resolution to this problem, I feel, without making undesirable compromises is to give the user an option under the 'Settings' menu that would allow him or her to decide which tab, if any, they want to be open when they first log in to his or her calendar.

Another interesting point is in regard to the first user my group interviewed during the week. This informant was pretty well versed in web technologies and during the interview provided a substantial amount of user interface design input. This differed markedly from our second user who focused more on providing more abstract input on his normal workflow. Each user provided, then, an amount of data that was specific to both their technological experience and personality, something I had not completely anticipated.

Overall, this last week was probably the most engaging of the design processes our group has conducted. The idosyncracies of paper prototyping seemed on a scale of differences far from any of the other design processes. It was more interactive and seemed to elicit more detailed user data.