mdt – Page 2 – Senior Thesis

What’s Unique About Your Project

Announcements

Next week we’ll begin developing Paper Prototypes of our projects
This week’s brown bag lunch – Ed Keller presents The Limits of Guitar: Relationships Between Musicians and Audience
Maker Faire this weekend

Some Links

Design Notebooks

Let’s take some time to review some of your Design Notebooks. When presenting:

Share your project concept
Show your User Personas
Who is your most important user group & why

What’s Unique About Your Project

Let’s take another look at the project canvas.

So far we’ve:

Identified a real need (problem) we want to address with our projects
Researched other existing alternatives to determine the state of the art
Identified our target audiences (customer segments) and analyzed them with User Personas and User Stories
Identified our most important user groups (early adopters) and what they need to be able to do with our solutions

Knowing all this; the need we’re addressing, who’s need it is, and how others are addressing it, we can now identify how our treatment will be different (Unique Value Proposition).

Exercise

Take a few minutes to review your project canvas so far. Review your problem statement, your existing alternatives, and your most important user groups.
Reflect on how you’d like to approach addressing the needs of your most important user groups.
How is this different from how your existing alternatives address those needs?
Why do you think your approach is better?
Write out a few drafts of a Unique Value Proposition for your project. State it as a “Single clear, compelling message that states why your project is different and worth paying attention to”.
Update your project canvas with your Unique Value Proposition.

High Level Concept

Your High Level Concept is a shorthand analogy you can use to quickly explain your unique approach. It’s also known as a High Concept Pitch.

You can state it as a comparison to some existing alternative, e.g. “Uber is AirBnB for car services”, or “Sharknado is Jaws meets Twister”, or “Youtube is Flickr for videos”, etc.

Exercise

Break up into groups and take turns presenting your Unique Value Propositions.
Brainstorm with your group to come up with a few High Level Concept statements that best describe your project by analogy.
Update your project canvas with your favorite High Level Concept

Assignment

Dashboard

Continue collecting links for current events relevant to your project, trends & events relevant to your project’s innovation context, and existing alternatives to your project.
Pick a few links to share in class next week

Solution

Review your project canvas so far
Review your problem statement and existing alternatives
Review your customer segments, especially your early adopters and their user stories
Review your unique value proposition and your high level concept
Based on on these steps in your process, outline a solution to your problem
Be sure to focus on your most important user group(s) and that you are taking a unique approach to addressing their needs
Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Project Solution”
Present your solution outline

Submitting Your Work

This week’s homework assignment is due next week before class. When you’ve completed them, post a comment on this page (Who’s Your Audience), including a link to your Design Notebook.

Users, Customers & Benefactors

Announcements

Tech’s Enduring Great-Man Myth

Design Notebooks

Let’s go around the room and review a number of your Design Notebook entries from last week.

Dashboards

How do you keep track of the companies where you’re interested in working? How about keeping track of games or apps similar to what you’d like to build? In short, how do you keep track of the state of the art in your industry sector?

One effective way is to use a dashboard solution.

Users, Customers & Benefactors

Target Audiences

Who are you creating your final project for? Who will use it? Who do you want to see it? Who would you like to pay you for it? These are your target audiences.

You may have several different target audiences. For example, if you’re creating a game, game players are certainly a target audience – and depending on your specific game content, those game players may be young, old, male, female, etc.

It’s important that you think specifically about for whom you’re creating your project. This allows you to more clearly focus your efforts on building something useful for a specific group of people.

Users are not the only target audience you might have, however. Even though you might be building a game for a specific set of game players, your goal may also to demonstrate your game development skills to a game company.

Which game company? Who at that game company do you want to see your work? What aspect of your work do you specifically want them to see? Your characters? Your game play? Your programming or animation skills? Who is responsible for those aspects of game development at the game company or companies where you’re interested in working.

Exercise

Make a list of all the people you want to see your final project. Try to organize them into categories (users, customers, employers, friends, family, etc). We’ll call these categories “customer segments”.

User Personas

User personas are written descriptions of specific people who you’d like to use and/or see your project. The goal of a user persona is to get you to empathize with the people who will be seeing your work, so that you have a better chance of creating something of value to them.

Exercise

Create a new Google Document and name it “User Personas”. For each customer segment you identified above, try writing out a profile of a specific person. Give them a name. Give them a profile picture. Write a short biography of that person, being as specific as possible; Where are they from? How old are they? Where do they work? Where did/do they go to school? Try to imaging as much about them as you possibly can.

User Stories

User stories are a narrative form of describing a specific action a customer segment wants to take using your project.

User Stories have a very specific structure:

“As a X, I want to be able to Y, so that I may Z.”

Where “X” is the user type (e.g. new user, customer, employer, friend, family member, etc), “Y” is the specific action they want to take, and “Z” is the reason for the action.

Here’s an example:

“As an animation employer, I want to see your range of animation techniques using the animation tools my company uses, so I can evaluate whether or not I should interview you.”

Exercise

Create a new Google spreadsheet and title it “User Stories”.
For each User Persona created above, create three user stories

Assignment

Innovation

Read Tech’s Enduring Great-Man Myth
Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Innovation Context”
Review your Innovator Design Notebook entry from the first week of class
In what context did your chosen innovators work that allowed them to contribute their work? Write a brief paragraph or two describing this context.

Create Your Dashboard

Create a dashboard using Netvibes or other dashboard aggregator (e.g. Facebook Interests or Flipboard)
Begin tracking the blogs, tweets and Facebook and/or Linkedin status updates from the companies where you’d like to work, the people behind projects similar to yours, and other companies, people or government entities involved in the innovation context of your project

Update Your Canvas

Using the the list of people who you’d like to see your thesis project, update your Lean Canvas by listing the categories of these people in the “Customer Segments” block.
Which categories are the most important? Which are most likely to give you good, honest feedback you can use to refine your project?
List those categories under “Early Adopters”.

User Personas & User Stories

Continue working on your User Personas, make sure you create at least one user persona per category of people (customer segment) you’d like to see your final project
Continue working on your User Stories, make sure you have at least 3 user stories per customer segment
Create a new slide in your Design Notebooks and title it “User Personas and User Stories”
Put in links to your User Personas Google document and your User Stories spreadsheet

Submitting Your Work

This week’s homework assignment is due before class next week. When you’ve completed it, post a comment on this page, including a link to your Design Notebook and Project Canvas. Come to class next week prepared to present your work.

Define Your Problem

Announcements

No class next week

Design Notebooks

Let’s go around the room and review your Design Notebooks from last week.

Defining Your Problem

Let’s review the lean canvas

Exercise

Make a copy the this Goggle Draw Lean Project Canvas template ( print out a copy if you’d prefer working on paper )
Take a few minutes to state your project concepts from last week’s assignment as problems
Fill in the 3 top problems in the Problem section of your canvas

Group Exercise

Break up into groups and take turns having your group mates rank order your top problems based on how important they are to them
Take time to discuss why group members ordered your problems the way they did.
Re-order your top problems according to the group’s feedback

Getting to the Root Cause of a Problem

Group Exercise

Group up again
Using the 5 Whys, analyze each group member’s top problem to try to get to the root cause of the problem.
Make a note of the root cause – save a new version of your canvas, substituting this root cause as your top problem.

Existing Alternatives

If you’re already aware of any existing alternatives that address your top problem, list them under Existing Alternatives. Do a few Google searches against your revised top problem to see what other alternatives might exist. Take notes and save links for reference later.

Assignment

Project Canvas

Re-visit the exercises above with a different group of friends. Have them rank your problems, then go through the 5 whys with each problem again with this new group. Update your project canvas with the revised problem list.
Continue researching existing alternatives. Try to determine the “state-of-the-art” for your top problem. Do these solutions address the root cause of the problem? How are they different from your project concept? Update your canvas with this list of existing alternatives.

Design Notebook

Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Problem Definition”
List your top 1 to 3 problems, listed in the order of importance based on your sorting exercise.
For your top problem, list links to at least 3 existing solutions along with a a description of how each is different from your concept different.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Product Management

While many of you will go on to become designers, programers or animators, others of you may find compelling opportunities as interactive product managers.

In any case, it’s important to have a basic familiarity with the role of product manager (aka producer), since you’ll likely work closely with PMs in whatever position you take after IMM.

Toward that end, over the off week (w/o Sept 6th), please read the Introduction and Basic Principles sections in A hitchhiker’s guide to product management. Be sure to scan the “Readings” subsection in Basic Principles, sampling the material to taste. Come prepared to discuss the reading next session.

Submitting Your Work

First Day of Class

Announcements

No class in 2 weeks (Tuesday follows Monday schedule on Sept. 8)

Intros

Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves. What’d you do this summer? What’s your focus here at IMM? Games? Video? Graphic design? Mobile/Web development?

Class Overview

Prepare for Spring Show
Develop as a professional
Practice Iterative (Agile) Development
Gain experience researching, developing and managing a product

Syllabus

Let’s review the syllabus.

Assignment

Read “Learning the long hard slog of product”
Create a Google Slide Presentation on Google Drive and title it “Design Notebook”
Create a slide and label it “Iterative Development”. Based upon the reading in “Interactions”, write a paragraph or two in your own words defining what you think iterative development means.
Look over the OnInnovation and The Innovators videos.
Pick one or two that resonate with you as a designer, developer & inventor. If none of these resonate, find a video from another source that does.
Create a second slide in your Design Notebook and share the links to your videos, along with a brief paragraph about why they resonate with you.
Create a third slide and label it “Project Ideas”. Think about 3 possible Senior Thesis project ideas and write a single paragraph describing each. Try to think in terms of a problem/solution, i.e. here’s an unmet need, and here’s my idea for addressing it.

Submitting Your Work

This week’s homework assignment is due before class next week. When you’ve completed it, post a comment on this page, including a link to your Design Notebook. Come to class next week prepared to present your work.