Category: Class Sessions

Presentation Workshop

Announcements

  • Unstaffed Grocery Stores
  • Tentative – today we’ll meet with the other section at about 11:00 to run through the final presentations
  • I’m planning on video recording the final presentations and adding links to the videos on your team pages
  • I’m returning your graded Midterm papers by email today – grades went into canvas earlier in the week

Team Pages

Let’s take 1/2 hour or so to update our team pages.

Make sure you’ve added a Documentation section and have links to your

  • Project Implementation Documentation
  • Project Design Documentation

Also, create a new section called Final Presentation and add a link to your Google Presentation for your final presentation

Final Presentations

Let’s take and hour or so to continue refining our final presentations. We’ll get together with the other section at about 11:00 come up with the presentation order and run through them.

Assignment

Final Presentations

Put the finishing touches on your presentations and practice, practice, practice.

It will feel much more natural (and comfortable to you) if you come to your final presentation having practiced it several times.

Team Pages

Be sure to update the link on your team page to the latest version of your presentation before we meet on Friday, 5/13 at 11:00am.

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

User Testing, Prototype Revisions

Announcements

  • This week we’ll complete our user testing exercises
  • Next week we’ll continue refining our projects & team pages, and begin documenting our prototypes in advance of delivery to our clients
  • The Usability Reports & Usability Testing Design Notebook entry due dates have been moved to next week Wednesday.

Design Notebooks & Team Pages

Let’s take a few minutes to review the project flows you’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks.

Paper Prototypes & User Testing

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.

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

Usability Reports

  • Together with your team, create a new Google Document and title it “Usability Report”
  • 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

  • Create a new heading called “Usability Testing” on your team page on the blog
  • Add a link to your Usability Report under this heading, include the date in the link text
  • Make sure all of the links on your team pages are actual links and not just urls in text. Proper links should be hyperlinked text that describes what is being linked to.

Design Notebooks

  • Individually, create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Usability Testing”
  • Write a brief paragraph highlighting what you learned about your prototype’s usability from the tests
  • Did anything surprise you?
  • Make a list of refinements you’d recommend your team make to your prototype based on the observations from the testing exercises
  • Include a link to your team’s Usability Report on your slide

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

User Testing

Announcements

Design Notebooks & Team Pages

Let’s take a few minutes to review your “Flows & Paper Prototypes” Design Notebook entries and team pages from last week.

Paper Prototypes & User Testing

Usability Testing

What is usability?

Why test usability?

  • Are end-users doing what you want them to be doing?
  • Are they doing what you expected them to do?
  • Did they become confused while trying to reach their goals?
  • Did you really think through all possible paths through the application?
  • Did they have a preferred path?
  • Are some paths unused?
  • Are some paths used in ways that weren’t intended?

Why use paper prototypes to test usability?

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.

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

Usability Reports

  • Together with your team, create a new Google Document and title it “Usability Report”
  • 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

  • Create a new heading called “Usability Testing” on your team page on the blog
  • Add a link to your Usability Report under this heading, include the date in the link text

Design Notebooks

  • Individually, create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Usability Testing”
  • Write a brief paragraph highlighting what you learned about your prototype’s usability from the tests
  • Did anything surprise you?
  • Make a list of refinements you’d recommend your team make to your prototype based on the observations from the testing exercises
  • Include a link to your team’s Usability Report on your slide

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

Flows & Paper Prototypes

Announcements

Design Notebooks

Let’s take a few minutes to review some of your Design Notebooks.

Project Status

How are your projects coming along?

Diagrams & Content Maps Redux

Team Blog Pages

Team Pages

Exercise

  • Organize into your teams and update your team’s class blog page with links to your diagrams and content maps
  • Make sure you also have a link to your project’s concept presentation on your team page

Flows & Paper Prototypes

Some examples

Paper Prototyping Tools

  • Paper
  • Cardboard
  • Scissors
  • Stickies
  • Pen/Pencil
  • POP

Exercise

  • Organize into your teams
  • Using your User Personas, User Stories and or Jobs, pick an example user and identify a specific task they need to be able to accomplish using your solution
  • Create a flow for the task by a list of steps that user will need to take to complete the task – be sure to include an entry point and final goal for the task
  • Create a set of drawings on paper that represent these interactions; these could be screens, or text messages, or voice menus, etc
  • Be sure to include descriptions of the specific content that will need to be present (just a description at the moment, you’ll need to develop the actual content later)

Assignment

Midterm Papers

If you didn’t submit your midterm paper this week, complete it and submit it no later than Wednesday, March 23rd at 11:59 pm in Canvas.

Reading

Paper Prototypes

  • Meet with your team and continue developing your paper prototypes
  • Based on the reading, and using your User Personas, User Stories and/or Jobs, pick two additional example users (for three total, including the one you developed in class) and identify specific tasks they need to be able to accomplish for your solution
  • Create flows for each by writing lists of steps they’ll need to take to complete the tasks – be sure to include entry points and goals
  • Create a set of drawings on paper that represent their interactions; these could be screens, or text messages, or voice menus, etc
  • Be sure to include descriptions of the specific content that will need to be present (just a description at the moment, you’ll need to develop the actual content later)

Design Notebooks

  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebooks and title it “Flows & Paper Prototypes”
  • Write a paragraph defining what flows are and why you should use them to describe what your system needs to do.
  • Include links to the flows and paper prototype images your team created for your project

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

Diagrams & Content Maps

Announcements

Paper Status Reports

Let’s take a few minutes to review the status of your papers.

Design Notebooks

Let’s take a few minutes to review your Design Notebooks:

  • Based on the best uses of User Personas + User Stories vs Jobs, which approach do you feel is more appropriate for your team?

Project Status Reports

Organize into your teams and let’s take a few minutes to talk about your projects’ status.

Questions for Partners

What questions did you prepare for your partners?

Partner Contacts

Did you make contact with your partner organization?

User Personas + User Stories vs Jobs

Which techniques did your team decide makes more sense for your situation?

How many were you able to create?

Diagrams & Content Maps

Why use diagrams?

What kinds of things should you diagram?

Exercise

Break up into your teams and:

  1. Based on one of your user stories/jobs from last week, create the list of steps a user needs to take to complete their goal. Do this for three of your user stories/jobs.
  2. Based on your research and the answers your partner organization gave in response to your list of questions, make a list of your partner organization’s goals.

Diagraming Tools

Exercise

  1. Using one of the tools listed above, create a user flow for one of the lists of steps created in the exercise above.
  2. Make a list of the content elements you’ll need to write, photograph, laser cut, etc to fulfill each of the steps in this user flow.
  3. Make a list of the content elements you’ll need to create in order to fulfill the goals of your partner organization.
  4. Create a content map based on this article, making sure to map each content element you listed in steps 2 & 3.

Assignment

Midterm Papers

Continue working on your midterm papers.

Team Projects

Meet with your team and complete the following:

User Flows

  • For each of your user stories and/or jobs diagram a complete user flow.

Content Maps

  • Based on your partner’s business goals and the user flows you diagramed, make a list of all content elements you’ll need to create, and diagram your content map.

Design Notebooks

  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebooks and title it “Diagrams & Content Maps”
  • Write a brief paragraph reflecting on the exercises you performed with your team this week. What went well? What could be improved?
  • Include a link to the user flows & content maps you and your team created this week.

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

User Research: Personas + Stories & Jobs

Announcements

Presentations

Let’s hear each team’s project concept presentation. Each team will evaluate each other’s presentation according to the rubric.

Midterm Papers

Option 1:

You’ve been hired…

Option 2:

Campbell’s Soup

User Research: Personas, Stories & Jobs

Whose problem is your project solving?

User Personas

  1. Make a list of everyone involved in the problem you’re addressing with your project.
  2. How many different types of people did you list?
  3. Now, for each type of person you identified, try to imaging a specific person who epitomizes that type.
  • How old are they?
  • Are they female or male?
  • Where do they live?
  • How much education do they have?
  • Do they drive?
  • Do they have internet access?
  • A cell phone?
  • Are they employed?
  • What’s their income?

What you just created are called Personas. Create a label for each persona type (e.g. unregistered user, registered user, administrator, etc).

User Stories

Now, take one of your user personas and ask yourself what kinds of things they need to be able to do with your solution.

Try to write out three examples using the following formula:

As a [user type], I want to be able to [feature], so that I can [benefit].

Here’s a worked example: As an unregistered user, I want to be able to see what types of features I’ll have access to before registering, so I’ll be able to accurately assess the value of registering

This is what’s known as a User Story. User stories allow you to create a “to do” list of features you need to implement in order to address the needs of your various user groups.

Try out Xtensio to create personas & stories online

Jobs

Understanding the Job

Designing Features using Job Stories

Assignment

Reading

Design Notebook (individually)

  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “User Research”
  • Close read the three articles above, User Personas, User Stories and Job Stories
  • Summarize what you understand the difference to be between personas + user stories vs job stories. Which do you feel is the appropriate tool for documenting your team’s user research?
  • Once your team has gathered your user research, add a link to your Design Notebook (make sure it’s shared appropriately)

User Research Document (as a team)

  • Create User Personas for each of the user types you’ve identified for your project
  • Review the Trenton 250 web site, the Food Assets report and your notes from the partner presentations and look for any references to demographics and user types that are relevant to your team’s project
  • Identify what information you WEREN’T able to determine about each of your user types from the above resources
  • Make a list of these open questions to ask your partner organization
  • Contact your partner and make arrangements to visit them and/or their organization in order to observe and/or interview as many of these user types as possible to gain a better understanding of the “jobs” they need to fill and how they go about filling them now
  • Based on these interviews/observations, create a list of personas & user stories or job stories, depending on your circumstances

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