May 13, 2007

This week our team focused on interpretation, modeling, consolidating, and creating the affinity diagram. I rotated through the roles of recorder, modeler, and narrator during the interpretation session. I feel that rotating through different roles helped me to gain understanding of the methodology that design teams go through to process raw data. Our team members taught each other on details to look for through providing different perspectives as we rotate through various roles. Sumed visited us during an interpretation and modeling session and gave us tips on how our models should look and things to watch out for. The team found it useful since our team members seem each have their own ways of structuring and annotating various models.

Regarding the affinity diagram, we each created notables on post it’s for the users whom we interviewed. The team would place their post it’s on our poster board and group them by context. It was chaotic in the beginning, since we did not really decide on what sort of groups we will have. However, I thought it was good to be messy early on, because that way we each share how we think the notables connect to one another. The team took turns rearranging the notables and creating topics to place the notables under. I had a lot of fun because as we iterate the affinity diagram, patterns and trends start to show. It was very interesting observing how the diagram is structured with context and design ideas start to flow as the team starts to make sense of the diagram.

Next week, the team will begin developing a concept based on the data that we have processed and organized. I will brainstorm with everyone and hopefully follow IDEO’s “Deep Dive” method and produce a worthwhile concept. The team plans to create the paper prototype after, which may be a challenge.

May 20, 2007

We started off by trying to concentrate on a specific area of our data. The team looked at the affinity diagram and tried to identify the breakdown that occurs most frequently. We discussed extensively and eventually decided on "integration of information to one source" to be of great value and a need that many users have.

Then, the team consolidated the sequence model. We actually had some trouble with that, because the data sets have different context to them and it is difficult to decide what to include. We played around with different levels of detail and eventually came to consensus on the consolidated sequence model. I find myself rephrasing team member's ideas and approaches to better facilitate understanding among the team. Of course, my team members helped me communicate my ideas too.

We followed up with storyboarding and visioning. Our team somewhat mixed the processes together along with brainstorming. We had a lot of fun coming up with ideas and improving each other's concepts. The team was fortunate enough to have whiteboards that we can draw on to visualize our thoughts and test things out visually. Everyone identified a lot of areas that we can work on and before we know it, we had a lot of things to integrate into the design. Initially, most of us were somewhat overwhelmed, but we realized that we will gain the most value out of focusing on "extending-tab windows". Once we decided that we struck gold, we thought it over quickly and finalized the design, which is a normal calendar in the middle and "extended-tab windows" on the right side.

The team then started building the prototype. It took us a little time, but we figured out to have pieces of paper cut ahead of time for the contextual interviewees to write on. We will be conducting these contextual interviews this week.

May 27, 2007

As of this point, the team has conducted four prototype interviews in two groups of three instead of three groups of two. The reason is simple logistics - one to record data, one to conduct the interview, and one to manage the prototype. The interviews took place at the user's place of residence and went relatively smoothly. In the beginning, we stumbled a bit on reacting fast enough to the users' actions on the prototype, but gradually everyone picked up the pace. 

One of the user my group interviewed was great. Even though the user is our first interview where we stumbled a bit, we had a great partnership. The user gave us a lot of insight and ideas on how to implement some features and options. On the flipside, we found that the function of our subscription feature is not intuitive to the user. When we asked our users to find a career services events, both went to the "To Do" tab instead of the "Calendar" tab, which is on top by default. The team will need to make sure that the subscription function will be obvious. Also, a user mentioned that the "Calendar" tab does not need to be on top since he prefers to see the to do list instead of what calendars or subscriptions are being displayed.

It is surprising to me that quality of feedback that we get is so great, even though the paper prototype is such a simple and cheap representation device.

The team will be meeting tomorrow to discuss results of the interviews. We will have another interpretation session and see what we get. From that point we will reiterate the prototype.

June 03, 2007

On Monday, May 28, the team met to reiterate our second prototype. There was a lot of user feedback, including suggestions, providing us with a lot of data to work off of. However, different users have different needs and sometimes give conflicting suggestions. For example, users would suggest different placement of the options for reminders. We decide through looking at other user data to see which suggestion the data supports. We made several changes and ended up removing a tab and adding a few more features.

Following the second round of prototyping, the team went out to test the prototypes with four more users. Some of the users are first time users and some are repeat users. This time around the team is more focused on testing particular changes that we made and confirming that the unchanged features are indeed intuitive and well layed out.

In today's meeting, the team went through the same process of interpreting user data and discuss what sort of changes should be made. This time we spend less time talking about major features and details, as they are validated through previous prototype testing rounds, and more time on less obvious features such as check boxes versus radio buttons. The team starts focusing a lot on the small details due to this being our final round of prototyping. After a good amount of deliberation, we decided on a final prototype and made a paper version of it. However, we want to have a digital version for ease of view and our personal feeling of accomplishment, so Ann and I spent hours today on photoshop to make mock ups of our product. We are very proud of it and look forward to presenting to the class.