5/13

This week our group actively engaged in the interpretation session where I had the role of the interviewer, note taker (recorder), and modeler. Through drawing the flow models I was able to better fully grasp the relationship between the user, artifacts, and entities involved in the user process. Moreover, participating in these different roles was a valuable experience as it forced me to be more involved in this user design process, and because of it I was able to gain stronger understanding of this project.

In addition, I finished the flow and sequence models for our interview subjects and post them on to the wiki. For the sequence models at first it was challenging to pinpoint exactly what the intents or triggers were but once I got that down I was able to better understand what the users were involved in. Each of these models had their own distinguishing attribute that helped me fully grasp the inner workings of their work.

As a group we worked on the affinity diagram. I came up with specific points and categories that corresponded to points of interest from my interviews. In addition, I created some second and third level hierarchical labels for these specific points. From doing this affinity diagram I was able to look at the data across all users to reveal scope of issues and drive consensus about what the data means. This was an important first step toward corporate knowledge of the users. We also worked on our power point presentation showing the progress of our project.

This coming week we will consolidate our work models and to try to reveal implications for design and hopefully create a common structure without losing variation across the users. I will also start working on our paper.

5/20

I started off this week working on consolidating the flow models with Jonathan. Specifically, the consolidated model captured the communication and coordination aspects of the users.From doing this we were able to analyze overall trends of the different users and put them all into perspective. We analyzed the roles of each entity and artifact and examined the work practice of each user. Initially it was difficult to consolidate the different work practices among the users but once we started listing down all the artifacts and entities we were able to complete this process.

We then put together all this information and included it into our presentation on Thursday. As a group we received feedback as to how we should go about catering to the specific needs of the users. From this I realized that we had to make our final prototype more specific and focus on some keys areas.

Today our team completed the consolidated sequence model. The consolidated sequence model showed the detailed steps performed to accomplish a task. We had some difficulty with this initially because we felt that we had to deal with two distinct types of sequences and consolidate them into one model. We solved this by taking a step back and examining the overall goal of the users - to coordinate a schedule with an entity or source. Overall, the consolidation of these models brought data from individual customer interviews together so our team could see the common pattern and structure. The challenge was to design for all of these individual users. However, the consolidated facilitated this process because it put all of the user's work practice into perspective. Consolidating these models proved to be a challenging process. However, it was well worth it because it captured the work of individuals and organizations.

We later came up with four user personas: intense user, in-between, users who mainly rely on external cues to do their tasks, and non-tech savvy users. We classified each of our interview subjects into these categories.

Next, we started to redesign work practice by visioning. Here we introduced scenarios and told a story of how our users would do their work with our prototype. Following that we sketched our storyboards where we worked out the details of the vision and scenarios. This allowed us to start on our paper prototype - we made a rough mockup of the interactive calendar interface. We included four main tabs: calendars, to-do, class planner, and notes and designed a sub-level menu under each tab.

This week we will finalize our paper prototype and conduct user interviews with these prototypes. If the user discovers that something is problematic, as a group we will redesign the prototype together to fit the needs of the users.

5/27

We started off this week by finalizing the paper prototypes. We added some more features and possible pop-ups/windows that the users would encounter when navigating through the prototype.

Later in the week we interviewed two subjects with a paper prototype. One thing we noticed was that the users each had their own communication style and had their own suggestions, which is why it is important to have several interview subjects.

Interestingly, the interviews turned out to be different from what we expected. Generally, I noticed that the users had different expectations as to which screens would pop up. As a result, we ended up asking the users what they expected to see on each screen and took note of it. This was important because it provided a way to look into design alternatives. We realized that our perception of system structure of our current prototype wasn't consistent with the user's. We found this out by asking them to do specific tasks and introducing scenarios only to find that the users had a different idea of how to approach each task. Each of the users provided their own suggestions for our interface usually stemming from their original sources of confusion or ambiguity in the prototype design.

In the end, we found out that the users found the tab feature valuable, as well as the to-do's. In addition, one thought that syncing schedules was another valuable feature that our prototype had to offer. That particular user, however, also gave us some suggestions on how to improve that certain feature.

We will continue conducting these user prototype interviews to get an additional layer of detailed data about user interaction within the system.

6/2

This week we conducted a few more prototype interviews based on our last two prototype iterations. We made some changes and improvements from our last prototype and we were looking to refine our prototype. We had a few more features that we wanted to test such as the search calendars feature that we felt needed some more feedback.

In particular, one of our users provided insightful feedback in how to implement our to-do feature. The user proposed that it would be displayed in such a way that it would span across the entire top of the calendar screen. By doing so, the user could see when the to-do event has to be done by. This was a novel idea that we really tried to implement, but we felt that that there were many things we had to be careful with before we actually design this. In addition, we needed more feedback from other users to see how they would react to this feature. In the end, we decided to not include this in our prototype. However, we might mention in our final presentation based on our findings, we would go in the direction of further exploring the to do feature.

We then further finalized our paper prototypes and our changes were reflected by our last few prototype interviews. We realized that we had to fabricate new feature screens that we had not thought of earlier. One of the challenges we faced was designing the reminders screen. There was one particular user who wanted to be reminded more than once prior to the actual event, so we wanted to our interface to facilitate that. After racking our brains, we decided to not sacrifice the simplicity of the interface yet still allow the one particular to set more than one reminder. Overall, there were many more issues that we conslidated.

Later, we worked on preparing for our final presentation. We decided to present our features by looking at the different user personas and seeing which features they would use. Next week we will continue preparing for our final presentation and consolidate the final paper.