Second Week Update

1. Discuss the progress on each task since the last week's posting:

Since the last posting we have had two team meetings.

• On 10/18 we met for a two hour brainstorming session. From the session we defined certain characteristics our interface should possess. We drafted an agenda for our first participatory design session.
  It includes:

1. What the goals of the first session are.
2. Questions to illicit information so we understand how they currently organize their tax deductible expenses.
3. User scenarios we can use to prompt the participants to think about frustrations, events that caused them trouble in the past, or things they enjoy about their current systems of organization.

• 10/24 we met for an hour. We discussed our next steps, participants we have scheduled, logistics for our first session.

Individually we have been researching our specific topics.

We have set our first participatory design session for Friday, Nov. 9. We have 4 participants confirmed for that session.


2. Outline the tasks and who is doing what in the coming week.

• Becca is setting up a Google calendar for us to use for scheduling the design sessions, follow-up group meetings, brainstorming sessions, and paper prototyping sessions.
• We will all be conducting additional ethnographic research with a conference call to a potential user that fits our "user persona" but doesn't have a flexible schedule to meet with us.
• Becca and Liz are going to visit a cell-phone store and get experience with a PDA (since we don't own one) and talk to the salespeople about features.
• We will all be continuing our individual research.

First Update Summary

Here's a brief summary of our group progress and upcoming tasks. Our first step was brainstorming potential research topics and choosing what we would each like to cover. The chosen topics are:

Troy: systems that support productivity (with a focus on relationship between a physical and electronic)

Becca: satisfaction/pleasure in an interface (with a look at heuristics)

Liz: the history/historical context of PDA's (includes a history of organization schemes and information management)

Next, we met to determine our goals for the two participatory design sessions.

Goal Sheet

Session 1:

• Goal: Through interviews, establish user feelings, opinions and beliefs about personal productivity.
• Goal: Investigate typical user scenarios (i.e., getting a restaurant or car rental receipt).
• Output: Create workflow/process representation that will guide interface design.

Session 2:

• Goal and Output: Test paper prototype with a minimum of two users; capture results; use to drive final design.

Our next actions for the upcoming week include: determining our magic wand interview questions, scheduling our two participatory design sessions, additional user recruitment (two so far) and agenda planning.

Here are some of our initial interview questions:

• What is the worst thing that ever happened to you with receipts?
• How do you feel when you face an accountant at the end of the year?
• If you could choose, would you use an accountant?
• How do you categorize your tax deductions (if you do at all)?
• Where do your receipts end up after you receive them? At the end of the day? At the end of the month?

touch points

I just rediscovered our brainstorming on touch-points - here they are in public, unedited form:

• location (place, context, time)
• electronic device
• emotional/physical state
• environment
• the human agent
• the receipt (paper or electronic)
• interface
• translation from device to computer/account
• source of receipt
• archives
• security
• website

next actions

• create a goal sheet for the participatory design (in this here blog)
• figure out what users to recruit

This is to get done by Monday, when we'll figure out the next next steps.

off to the grand adventure

Hey everybody! Here I am!

Notes from our pre-Kath Straub meeting

Group Process:

• We now have our Blog Loser blog, which we should all be able to post to. The URL is 612final.blogspot.com.
• Outside-of-blog discussion and document sharing will be done through email with the subject line 612final.
• For prototyping we'll do most of our work together in-the-flesh after we've kicked Duncan out of his office for a very long smoke break (or just write on our gray-board).

Research Topics:

First, the full ist we came up with -

• the PDA interface
• the history/historical context of PDA's (includes a history of organization schemes and information management)
• market positioning
• user groups
• interaction between the physical object and interactive devices / system support (is this right?)
• ergonomics
• heuristics for the small screen
• satisfaction/pleasure for users of an interface
• user adoption drivers
• systems that support productivity

And now, what we each chose:

Troy: systems that support productivity (with a focus on relationship between a physical and electronic)

Becca: satisfaction/pleasure in an interface (with a look at heuristics)

Liz: the history/historical context of PDA's (includes a history of organization schemes and information management)