Month: April 2016

Project Workshop

Announcements

Team Pages

Let’s take a few minutes to review your team pages.

Project Workshop

Final Presentation Overview

Let’s take a few minutes to discuss your final presentations.

What’s the purpose of your presentation?

  • As a team, you are storytellers
  • Together, your mission is to construct an engaging and convincing argument demonstrating the value of your interactive solution

To achieve this, you’ll need to work together, each team member speaking with confidence and authority about a component of your team’s solution.

  • The whole of your solution should come off as greater than the sum of it’s parts – this will happen when each team member presents as the authority on their component, separate, but in harmony with the other team members
  • Together, your are an ensemble, a band, an orchestra – The Weather Report, The Rolling Stones, the London Symphony Orchestra

Exercise

Take a few minutes to pick a patron ensemble, band or orchestra for your team.

Final Presentation Elements

  • What? What problem is your solution addressing?
  • Who? Who are the stakeholders?
  • How? How does your solution address the problem?
  • Why? Why did you take this approach?
  • When? When could your partner begin using your solution?

Exercise

Together with your team, review your team pages & the project deliverables you’ve generated over the course of the semester. Organize your deliverables against each of the elements listed above (i.e. User Personas & User Stories might map to the Who, the Usability Reports could map to the Why, etc).

Assignment

  • Together with your team continue organizing your deliverables from the semester against the elements listed above
  • As a team, agree amongst yourselves who will be responsible for presenting which elements
  • Individually, begin organizing how you would like to present your section
  • Next week we’ll begin constructing your presentations

 

User Testing Redux

Announcements

Design Notebooks

Let’s take a few minutes to review your Design Guidelines documentation you developed over last week.

User Testing with Prof. Ault’s Class

Prepping Exercise

  • Together with your team, review your paper prototypes to make sure they clearly represent user flows you intend to develop for your project.
  • Revise your paper prototype as necessary in preparation for usability testing
  • Make a list of specific things your team would like to observe about how your test users use your prototype

Paper Prototype Usability Testing Roles

  • Tester – The one who was going to test the other teams’ prototypes. This person will be asked to “think aloud” while testing the prototypes, to give observers context.
  • Computer/Device – This person should remain silent and react to the tester’s commands using the paper prototype components. For example, when the tester texts a response to an SMS prompt, the “Device” should swap in the next prompt (tip: be sure to include error messages)
  • Assistant-computer – In times of need, an “assistant-computer” to give the “computer/device” some extra processing power! (i.e., on-the-fly cutting and pasting of missing GUI elements, SMS prompts or messages).
  • Observer – This person writes down everything the testers say and do, but especially what they don’t/can’t do or have difficulty with.

User Testing Exercise

  • Organize your team into the usability testing roles listed above
  • We’ll cycle around the room 3 or 4 times, rotating roles each time
  • Between each cycle, make revisions to your paper prototype bsed on the observations of the previous cycle
  • We want everyone to play each role, and each team should end up with 3 or 4 sets of usability testing observations to use as inputs for refining your prototypes
  • Did your paper prototype improve with each subsequent cycle?

Assignment

2nd Usability Reports

  • Together with your team, create a new Google Document and title it “Usability Report v2”
  • Identify your team and the date on the report
  • Create a heading called Methodology and write a description of how you conducted your usability tests, including how many rounds of testers were tested. Also include descriptions of the roles team members performed during testing (see the roles listed above)
  • Create another heading called Objectives and list the specific things your team was looking to validate through the testing
  • Create another heading called Observations and combine the three or four sets of observations into one master list. Be sure to de-duplicate repeated observations

Team Page

  • Add a link to your 2nd Usability Report under your Usability Testing heading, include the date in the link text

Project Design Documentation

Announcements

Design Notebooks

Let’s take a few minutes to review the team Project Implementation Documentation you developed over last week.

Project Design Guidelines

Visual & Graphic Identities

Exercise

  • Review your project concept document and create a word map that represents the qualities your project needs to project to be successful
  • Cycle through each word in your list, executing Google image searches on each word
  • Select three images that best represent each word
  • Assemble all your images onto a single Google Document
  • Do the images collectively represent the mood and spirit of your project?
  • If yes, use a palette generator like Adobe Color CC to generate a palette that best represents your project visually
  • What about a font?

System Persona Guidelines

Developing a bot, SMS or IVR system? What voice attributes best represent your project? Male or female voice? Younger or older? Fun or serious?

Exercise

  • Review the mood board you created in the previous exercise
  • What voice attributes can you identify to can use in copy for your project (for posters, sms messages, or other text)?
  • Make a list of these attributes

Assignment

Team Project Design Guidelines Documentation

  • With your team, review the word list, graphics, fonts and writing voice attributes you identified during the graphics and voice identity exercises you did in class
  • Repeat any of the steps from either exercise if you’re not completely satisfied with your project’s graphic and voice identity
  • Create a new Google Drive and write up a Design Document that reflects the identity guidelines you’ve identified
  • Include sections for mood, palette, type treatment, logo usage, and text voice attributes
  • Update your team page on the blog and link your new identity guidelines under your “Project Documentation” heading

Design Notebooks

  • Individually, create a new slide in your Design Notebooks and title it “Design Guidelines”
  • Write a brief paragraph summarizing your team’s Design Identity
  • Be sure to include a link to your team’s Design Guideline Google Document

*Submit the link to your Design Notebook to Canvas before we meet again next week

Project Implementation Documentation

Announcements

  • Kik & Kik Bot
  • Team Breakfast Mafia, I have a Trenton middle school nurse contact for you

Project Status

Let’s take a few minutes to review the status of each of your projects. Let’s review each of your Usability Reports.

Exercise

With your group, make sure your team pages are up to date. I’ll come around and review each your team pages.

Minimally, you should have links to:

  • Document Concept
  • User Personas
  • User Stories and/or Jobs
  • Flow diagrams
  • Paper Prototypes
  • Usability Reports
  • Documentation

Please make sure your Team Page presents well, you should be using this to get feedback from your partners and will use it as the starting place for your final presentations.

Documentation

Why document your projects?

What kinds of things should you document?

  • Equipment requirements
  • Architectural requirements
  • Software requirements
  • Accounts
  • Maintenance procedures
  • Update procedures
  • Expenses and estimated budgets
  • Others?

Exercise

Project Documentation List

For each member  on your team, take turns role playing that you are your client partner. As the client partner, imagine what you would need to know if you were to actually try to implement your team’s project. Start a list with the first role player, adding to it with each additional role player.

Draft Project Implementation Documentation

  • Create a new Google Drive document and title it Project Implementation Documentation
  • Scour over your list, looking for common themes
  • For each theme, create a heading in your document; for example, if your project requires usernames and passwords to be able to use it, include a section on user names and passwords
  • Other headings might include, hardware requirements, software requirements, maintenance requirements, marketing and promotion, etc.

Project Workshop

Continue iterating on your projects with your team. If you need to feedback on any of your refinements, ask another team to help test using the usability testing procedures we worked through last week.

Assignment

Project Implementation Documentation (As a team)

With your team, continue refining your Project Implementation Document.

  • Make sure you have a heading for each important group of tasks and considerations your client will need to set up and implement your project
  • Include a draft narrative for each item in the list you developed in class
  • This is a draft document you will be updating as you continue to refine your project
  • Consider using diagrams, screenshots and data tables
  • With your team mates assign ownership of each section of the document. Who will be responsible for keeping this section of the Project Implementation Documentation up to date?

Design Notebooks (Individually)

  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Implementation Documentation”
  • Write a brief paragraph outlining which sections of the Project Implementation Documentation you will be responsible for keeping up to date

*Submit the link to your Design Notebook to Canvas before we meet again next week