Category: Class Sessions

Final Preparations for Show

Announcements

  • Course Assessments in PAWS
  • AIMM After Dark Show this Friday, 5:00-9:00
  • Vision Documents due a week from this Friday, 12/11 at 9:00

AIMM After Dark Logistics

Materials

You Need

  1. Project Slide for Senior Slideshow
  2. Completed Project Canvas
  3. The ability to clearly speak about your project concept in terms of the canvas
  4. Prototype artifacts to demonstrate your concept (any of the following)
    • Sketches/Concept Art/Storyboards
    • User Personas/User Stories
    • Diagrams
    • Paper Prototype(s)
    • Video demos
  5. Business Cards/Contact Info
  6. A means of capturing feedback (questionnaires, forms, etc.)

Specs & Drop Locations

Exercise

  • Finalize your slides & post them to the shared drive
  • Finalize your equipment requirements & post them to the spreadsheet
  • Format your videos according to the spec & post it to the shared drive

Exercise

  • Continue developing your project artifacts in support of your show presentation

Assignment

  • Don’t forget your Vision Document for next week’s Final Exam date, Friday 12/11, 9:00 – 11:50
  • Use this template

Prep for Show

Announcements

  • Next week – continue prepping for show
  • Dec 4 – AIMM After Dark
  • Final Exam – 12/11 8:00 – 10:50

Vision Documents

Senior Thesis Vision Document template

Prep for Show

You Need:

  1. Project Slide for Senior Slideshow (post it here on Google Drive)
  2. Completed Project Canvas
  3. The ability to clearly speak about your project concept in terms of the canvas
  4. Prototype artifacts to demonstrate your concept (any of the following)
    • Sketches/Concept Art
    • User Personas/User Stories
    • Diagrams
    • Paper Prototype(s)
  5. Business Cards/Contact Info
  6. A means of capturing feedback (questionnaires, forms, etc.)

Assignment

Try to decompress & enjoy Thanksgiving! We’ll use class next week for finishing touches on your project artifacts for the show.

Unique Qualifications

Announcements

  • Next week – prep for show
  • Vision Documents due on 12/11
  • Final Exam date – 12/11 8:00-10:50

Links

Design Notebooks

Let’s take a few minutes to review your design notebooks.

Unique Qualifications

Let’s review the project canvas.

  1. Problem & Existing Alternatives
  2. Customer Segments & Early Adopters (Target Audience)
  3. Unique Value Proposition & High Level Concept
  4. Solution
  5. Channels
  6. Revenue Streams – what’s in it for you?
  7. Cost Structure – what equipment/software/materials/services do you need and how much will they cost?
  8. Key Metrics of Success
  9. Unfair Advantage

Why are you uniquely qualified to create your project?

What interests, experiences and skills give you a unique perspective from which you can approach your stated problem?

Your experiences here at IMM are certainly an unfair advantage – the classes, faculty, staff and your fellow student – as is the council and support of your friends and family. What else can you think of? Internships? Jobs? Summer camps?

Exercise

  • Take a few minutes to make a list of your unique interests, experiences and skills.
  • Update your project canvas with your list.

What You’ll Need for the Show

  1. Project Slide for Senior Slideshow
  2. Completed Project Canvas
  3. The ability to clearly speak about your project concept in terms of the canvas
  4. Prototype artifacts to demonstrate your concept (any of the following)
    • Sketches/Concept Art
    • User Personas/User Stories
    • Diagrams
    • Paper Prototype(s)
  5. Business Cards/Contact Info
  6. A means of capturing feedback (questionnaires, forms, etc.)

Exercise

Begin collecting all the elements you need for the show:

  • Create an inventory of what you have completed and what you need to finish up.
  • Make a todo list for completing your inventory

Individual Progress Meetings

While you continue prepping your materials for the show, I’ll come around individually to discuss your projects.

Assignment

Projects

  • Continue completing the artifacts you’ll need for the show.

Vision Documents

  • Begin thinking about how you would write up a narrative version of your canvas. I’ll provide a template next week for you to follow.

Key Metrics

Announcements

Links

Design Notebooks

Let’s take a few minutes to review your Design Notebooks/Projects.

Winter Show

Let’s envision what we want our Winter Show to be like:

  • What would you like to show?
  • How would you like to show it?
  • Who do you want to see it?
  • Why?

What about atmosphere?

  • Should there be food?
  • Should there be music?
  • What else?

Key Metrics of Success

Let’s review the project canvas.

  1. Problem & Existing Alternatives
  2. Customer Segments & Early Adopters (Target Audience)
  3. Unique Value Proposition & High Level Concept
  4. Solution
  5. Channels
  6. Revenue Streams – what’s in it for you?
  7. Cost Structure – what equipment/software/materials/services do you need and how much will they cost?
  8. Key Metrics of Success
  9. Unfair Advantage

What’s a key metric (aka KPI)?

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.

– Web Analytics 2.0

Top 5 Google Analytics KPIs

Exercise

Let’s go around the room and identify a number of KPIs for each of your projects.

Assignment

Projects

  • Continue prototyping your projects. Pick the biggest unknown and try to create a small prototype to eliminate the unknowns.

Project Canvas

  • Identify 3 key metrics that you’ll use to measure the success of your project. It could be the number of business cards requested by visitors to the show, number of interviews lined up as a result of your demonstration, etc. Just make sure it’s a ratio and that it’s something you can (and will) measure online or at the show.
  • Update your project canvas with your key metrics of success.

Design Notebooks

  • Create a new slide and label it “Progress for ” and today’s date.
  • Write a brief paragraph on your progress this week.
  • Identify the biggest unknown for your project and write a sentence or two about a small prototype you could make that will eliminate that unknown.

Dust or Magic?

Announcements

  • We’re attending Dust or Magic today, 9:00-11:30

Dust or Magic

Assignment

Design Notebook

  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and label it “Winter Show Suggestions”
  • Write a brief paragraph about what you would like to see at this semester’s winter show. How should we present it? Who should we invite? What would you like to get out of it?
  • Create another slide in your Design Notebook and title it with today’s date.
  • Write a brief synopsis of your progress this and last week, including links to your project canvas and prototypes

Project Canvas

Please update your project canvas if you’re not quite up to date. You should have info for:

  • Problem & Existing Alternatives
  • Customer Segments & Early Adopters
  • Unique Value Proposition & High Level Concept
  • Solution
  • Channels
  • Revenue Streams (or What’s in it for you)
  • Cost Structure ( or what hardware, software, services, printing, subscriptions, etc you need for your project)

Project

  • Continue developing your project, prototyping the parts that are most uncertain in order to eliminate the unkowns

Submitting Your Work

Please post a link to your Design Notebook as a comment to this page before class next Tuesday, 11/10/15.

Cost Structure & Functional Prototypes

Announcements

Design Notebooks

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

Links

Cost Structure

Let’s review the project canvas.

  1. Problem & Existing Alternatives
  2. Customer Segments & Early Adopters (Target Audience)
  3. Unique Value Proposition & High Level Concept
  4. Solution
  5. Channels
  6. Revenue Streams – what’s in it for you?
  7. Cost Structure
  8. Key Metrics of Success
  9. Unfair Advantage

What is cost structure?

Let’ go around the room and talk about what expenses we may have for our projects,

  • Expenses can be one time, like buying a computer or peripheral, or they can be repeating or ongoing, like renting equipment, rendering time, or a paid account on Github for private development repositories.
  • Be sure to think about promotional expenses like printing for posters or business cards that may not be directly related to your project, but are important for showing it.

Exercise

Take 1/2 hr or so to think about your project and what expenses you’ll need to cover.

  • What software, hardware, equipment or services do you need to develop your project? List everything and include price estimates
  • What kinds of software, hardware, equipment or services do you need to present your project at the Spring Show? List everything and include price estimates
  • Create a master list in two sections, development expenses and show expenses.
  • Add your expense list to your project canvas

Assignment

Project Canvas

  • Update the Cost Structure block of your project canvas with the expenses list you worked up in class.
  • Review your canvas and reflect on the direction of your project.
  • Does your project directly address your stated problem?
  • Does it target the needs of your early adopters?
  • Have you quantified what you’ll get in return for successfully completing (and showing) your project?

Functional Prototypes

  • If you haven’t already begun translating your paper prototype into a functional prototype, begin doing so now
  • Focus on the most difficult (or uncertain) aspect of the project first
  • You want to eliminate the unknowns as quickly as possible so you can identify what resources you’ll need in order to successfully complete your project next semester

Revenue Streams

Announcements

  • Dust or Magic in 2 weeks on Nov 3rd
  • Midterm status reports due this week – please make sure you’re up-to-date on your Design Notebooks and Project Canvases
  • Let’s talk about next semester
  • Next week –  budgets & expenses

Design Notebooks

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

Links

Revenue Streams

Let’s take a look at the project canvas template.

  1. Problem & Existing Alternatives
  2. Customer Segments & Early Adopters (Target Audience)
  3. Unique Value Proposition & High Level Concept
  4. Solution
  5. Channels
  6. Revenue Streams – what’s in it for you?
  7. Cost Structure
  8. Key Metrics of Success
  9. Unfair Advantage

What’s a revenue stream?

For our purposes, let’s think of this as any kind of remuneration for your efforts. This could be a job, an investor, a customer, happy parents, a good grade, etc.

Exercise

Take a few minutes to think about what you would like to get in return for all your efforts this semester and next developing your senior thesis.

  • Make a list of everything you’d like to get in return for your project
  • Order the list in terms of what’s most important to least important
  • Try to assign a numeric value to each reward; i.e. if you hope to get a job out of it, how much should that job pay? Investors? How much investment are you looking for? Customers? How much should they pay you for your service?
  • How can you find out what the going rates are for jobs in your field (hint: Glassdoor)? Looking for customers? How much do your existing alternatives charge for their services? Investors? How much money have your existing alternatives raised?

Assignment

Reading

Please read Junior UX Designer Pains: The First Job

Design Notebook

  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebooks and title it “Dream Job”
  • Write a brief paragraph describing your dream job – what would you be doing? Where would it be? Would you be working at a big company? A small company? Your own company?
  • Create an account on Glassdoor.com
  • Do a few searches on Glassdoor for job titles you’d like to have
  • What’s the average salary for that job title in the location you’d like to work?
  • Check out Money.com’s cost of living calculator
  • Input the average salary figure you found on Glassdoor.com into the calculator along with your current city and the location of your dream job
  • What’s the cost of living in that location?

Project Canvas

  • Update your project Canvas with your list of things you hope to earn as a result of your Senior Thesis project

Channels & Prototypes

Announcements

  • Midterm break next week – no class
  • Make sure your Design Notebooks and Project Canvases are up to date
  • Next meeting 10/20/2015 where we’ll discuss ROI and continue refining our prototypes

Design Notebooks

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

Links

Channels

Let’s take another look at the Project Canvas.

What other channels are out there we should be aware of?

Exercise

  • Take a few minutes to list all of your current professional organization/community profiles.
  • Are there any memberships or accounts you should have but don’t? Make a list of memberships or accounts you need to create to effectively target your early adopter audience(s).

Prototypes

Let’ take a few minutes to tweak your paper prototypes:

  • Think about one example user
  • Think about one task that user should be able to accomplish using your project
  • On a separate document or sheet of paper, list out the steps necessary for that
  • Create a paper model demonstrating that list of steps

Exercise

Now that you’ve prototyped your users task, let’s beak up into groups of 4 or so and try out each other’s prototypes. Make notes on any questions or alternative uses that show up.

Assignment

Channels

LinkedIn

  • If you don’t already have a LinkedIn account, register one.
  • Log in a create and/or brush up your LinkedIn profile.
  • Include your Education, including your focus and special interests.
  • Include all your internships and/or employment history, emphasizing your experience RELATED to your focus and special interests
  • If possible, link in to your internship and/or employer supervisors and request endorsements for each position

Focus-specific Community

  • If you don’t already have one, create an account on one or more professional communities related to your area of interest
  • Polish up your account, making sure your profile is complete, including an avatar image other than the default – try to make this consistent across all your professional accounts
  • If the service supports portfolios (Behance, Github, etc), select your best work, polish it up, and share it publicly – only share your best work – quality over quantity – even if it’s just one or two pieces at this point. Keep everything else private until you can bring it up to your best standards.

Project Canvas

Update the Channels block in your canvas, listing all the professional communities in which you intend to share your Thesis Project in order to target your best employment and/or customer prospects.

Design Notebook

  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Channels”
  • Write a brief paragraph describing the kind of people you would most like to see your Thesis Project (are they your Early Adopters?)
  • List the professional organizations/communities you have created accounts for, along with links to your profiles

Prototypes

  • Continue iterating on your paper prototypes, try creating digital versions of your paper prototypes to begin transitioning from your paper to your functional prototypes

Solutions

Announcements

A good company builds one product, learns from its customers, and iterates to make that product exceptional

Design Notebooks

Let’s review some of your Design Notebooks.

Discussion: Build or Borrow

Links

Solutions

Let’s take another look at the project canvas.

Exercise

  1. Take a few minutes to think about how an early adopter of your project might use it the first time.
  2. Try writing this out as a series of steps, sort of like a recipe.
  3. Now think about another kind of user, or perhaps the same user as before, but now they’re coming back a second time. Are they following exactly the same steps? Or is there a different sequence they’ll need to follow.
  4. Write out this sequence as a separate series of steps.
  5. Continue doing this exercise for a total of three different users.

Paper Prototypes

Why paper?

A List Apart: Paper Prototyping

How to

Paper Prototypes and Mockups

Exercise

Using the sequences your wrote out in the previous exercise, begin creating a paper prototype of your project.

  • If you’re creating an animation or film, mock up a story board to establish flow
  • A web site or mobile app? Draw out a rough of what the UI might look like in blocks (you can use POP later to generate stub pages)
  • A process? Create paper markers for the different participants in the process. Hand them out to people representing each element of the process and havr them act out the flow
  • etc

Assignment

Solution

  • Update your project canvas solution block with your solution outline
  • Continue collecting links about the state of the art of your field, the innovation context of your field, organizations where you’d like to work, or their competitors
  • Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and label it “Solution”
  • Write a brief paragraph describing your solution
  • Include a link to your project canvas

Paper Prototype

  • Continue developing your paper prototypes
  • Come to class next week prepared to test your prototype with your classmates

What’s Unique About Your Project

Announcements

Some Links

Design Notebooks

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

  1. Share your project concept
  2. Show your User Personas
  3. 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.