Blog Loser

Contextual Design - Week 14

2008-05-20T04:21:00.003+09:30

What we did:

1. Finalized notes combing.
2. Created a list of "objects," a list of problems, and a list of solutions/recommendations.
3. Met with Assistant Director and Processor to review our draft task flows.
4. Draft participant profiles.
5. Draft heuristic review.

What we have planned:

1.Finalize draft deliverable and presentation.
2. Give presentation to Kathryn Summers, Nancy Kaplan and students (5/21/08).
3. Give presentation to Wendy Bolyard and Miriam King (6/5/08)

Contextual Design - Week 13

2008-05-13T02:54:00.003+09:30

What we did:

1. Have multiple task combing / notes reviewing meetings.
2. Drafted Checklist for deliverable / presentation.
3. Drafted Visio task flows.
4. Met with processors / assistant director to review to review our draft task flows.
5. Discussed how to outline participant info to preserve anonymity.

What we have planned:

1. Have at least one more note combing meeting.
2. Finalize draft task flows / process flows and meet with processors / assistant director to review.
3. Draft participant profiles.
4. Finalize draft of heuristic review.

Contextual Design - Week 12

2008-05-02T00:42:00.005+09:30

What we did:

1. Had a group meeting to discuss how to approach the data we have collected.
2. Had a "Brian Dump" meeting to just review what we have been thinking about as problems, solutions and/or recommendations.
3. Created a plan to deal with our huge amount of meeting notes.
4. Had three intense task combing / affinity diagramming meetings.
5. Created a list of themes, recommendations, and a to do list.
6. Troy and Liz have been using their Sequential Visualization class to start concept maps and task flows for the program directors. They aren't in final form but they have been helpful in thinking through the processes we want to capture for the deliverable and the methods we want to use.

What we have planned:

1. Have post affinity diagramming review / clean up of notes.
2. Start creating task flows and other deliverables.
3. Conduct heuristic review of the Graduate Admissions website.
4. Review artifacts we have collected.
5. Review metrics we have collected.

Week 11

2008-04-23T01:32:00.005+09:30

What we did:

1. Elizabeth was out of town but did readings from "Mental Models" and took notes to implement the Young's mental models process.
2. Continue to type up notes and comb for tasks /themes / issues.
3. Create a summary of program director's process for reviewing applications.

What we have planned:

1. Have group meeting to discuss how to approach the data we have collected.
2. Have intense task combing meeting.
3. Conduct affinity diagraming session.
4. Begin drafting of flows / mental models / concept maps.

Contextual Design - Week 10

2008-04-12T01:27:00.005+09:30

What we did:
1. Conducted CI interviews with Stephanie Gibson and Ron Desi (program directors)
2. E-mailed Wendy Bolyard for metrics.
3. Typed up previous meeting notes.
4. Did readings from "Mental Models."
5. Met to discuss what flows we want to include in our deliverable.

What we have planned:

1. Elizabeth will be out of town but will be reading from "Mental Models."
2. Continue to type up notes and comb for tasks /themes / issues.
3. Begin drafting of flows.

Contextual Design - Week 9

2008-04-04T04:41:00.002+10:30

What we did:
1. Conducted contextual interviews with Wendy and Racquel.
2. Contacted program directors and set up interviews with Ron Desi, Director of the Business School (will interview 4/7) and Stephanie Gibson, Program Director for Publications Design (will interview 4/10).
3. Typed out notes from sessions.
4. Discuss/review our notes for themes, what we are seeing, next steps.
5. Read portions of Indi Young's book "Mental Models."

What we have planned:

1. Meetings with program directors.
2. Collect metrics data.
3. In general, have all data collected by the end of the week.
4. Get notes typed up.
5. Continue reading of "Mental Models.

Contextual Design - Week 8

2008-03-28T02:38:00.002+10:30

What we did:

1. Scheduled contextual interviews with Wendy and Racquel (for Monday, March 31st).
2. Had a casual meeting with Brigid to talk about program directors to meet (Liz)
3. Met to discuss next steps.

What we have planned:

1. Conduct contextual interviews with Wendy and Racquel.
2. Contact program directors to set up interviews.
3. Review tapes.
4. Discuss/review our notes for themes, what we are seeing, next steps.
5. Collect and Review metrics.

Contextual Design - Week 7 (Spring Break)

2008-03-28T02:31:00.003+10:30

What we did:

1. Typed up interview notes.
2. Worked on outlining Contextual Design text.
3. Met to talk about what we were seeing, next steps.
4. Discussed Mental Models (Young) text.
5. Confirmed dates for next steps (research, analysis, presentation) and what we wanted from the deliverable.

What we have planned:

1. Schedule contextual interviews with Wendy and Racquel.
2. Have a casual pop-in meeting with Brigid and Dean and get the scoop on what program directors to meet with (Liz to do).
3. Discuss/review our notes for themes, what we are seeing, next steps.
4. Collect and Review metrics.

Contextual Design - Week 6

2008-03-14T03:36:00.005+10:30

What we did:

1. Conducted contextual interviews of processors and assistant directors (3/10-3/11)
2. Conducted mini-meetings between sessions and a large meeting after all of the session to discuss what we were seeing and possible next steps.
3. Typed interview notes.
4. E-mail Wendy for information on metrics.

What we have planned:

1. Schedule contextual interviews with Wendy and Racquel.
2. Meet with Miriam King and Peter Toran.
3. Discuss/review our notes for themes, what we are seeing, next steps.
4. Review metrics.

Contextual Design - Week 5

2008-03-14T03:28:00.004+10:30

What we did:

1. Scheduled grad admissions staff contextual interviews (for Monday and Tuesday of next week (3/10 - 3/11)
2. Finalized Field Guide / Assembled equipment needed
3. Discussed how we would run each session and who would be the interviewer.
4. We continued to read / research.

What we have planned:

1. Meet with processors and assistant directors -on Monday and Tuesday of next week (3/10 - 3/11)

2. After each meeting- discuss what we are seeing and if we need to change the field guide.
3. Have a meeting after all four are done to discuss what we are seeing and next steps.
4. E-mail Wendy for information on metrics.
5. Type up interview notes.

Week 4

2008-03-05T02:51:00.006+10:30

What we did:

1. Joined Wendy Bolyard and her staff for a weekly staff meeting. We only observed the meeting and did not ask questions. We wanted to be introduced to the staff but we mainly wanted to observe the dynamic of the department.

2. Had a post-staff meet meeting (just the three of us) to discuss what we saw and the plan next steps.

3. We continued to read / research.

What we have planned:

Objectives for the group meeting on Tuesday the 4th:
1. Scheduling grad admissions staff contextual interviews.
2. Draft documents (field guide, survey, etc.).
3. Discuss what we need to be prepared for the interviews (equipment, incentives, etc.).
4. E-mail Wendy for information on metrics.

Contextual Design - Week 3

2008-02-20T02:31:00.002+10:30

What we did:

1. We had a second meeting with Wendy Bolyard. She invited Brigid Lawler, Assistant Director / YGCLA Graduate Admissions, so we could be introduced. Brigid will be a second contact source for when Wendy is not available.

The meeting was very productive. We isolated some areas of focus and learned about the internal and interdepartmental working dynamic and history. We also clarified Wendy's answers to our post 2/5/08 meeting e-mail.

2. After the meeting we brainstormed and agreed that pulling programs directors into the project would be beneficial to the success of recommendations that result from the contextual inquiry. Graduate admissions has a close relationship with program directors and Wendy and Brigid are trying to establish a strong working relationship.

What we have planned:

We will meet (2/19/08) and hash out the following:

1. Scheduling grad admissions staff contextual interviews.
2. Recruiting program directors and program coordinators and incentives for participants.
3. Documents we need to draft.
4. What we need to be prepared for the interviews.

Contextual Design - Week 2

2008-02-09T02:20:00.000+10:30

Week 2

We met with Wendy Bolyard for a "get to know you" session and to discuss our ideas about incorporating graduate admissions in our contextual inquiry independent study. She was very enthusiastic about our project and offered to assist however she could.

Troy e-mailed Wendy with a few questions to think about for our next meeting:

1) Can you think of three potential processes, systems, or other projects that you
might need help with?

2) What are three of the greatest challenges your office is currently facing?

3) If you had a magic wand and could change anything about work--at any level--what
would you pick?

4) What is the best thing so far about being where you are workwise?

5) Finally, what are a few of the things that you think it's most important to
measure? This can certainly include things you'd like to measure, not just things
that are already being measured.

Prior to our meeting we met to discuss how we should structure this meeting. After the meeting with Wendy we regrouped to discuss what we would want to do before the next meeting with Wendy.

Troy and Becca met with Kathryn regarding the independent study.

For next week:

1. Have second meeting with Wendy on Tuesday the 12th. Get further details so we
can map out our field guide.
2. Continue reading and outlining Contextual Design

Contextual Design - Week 1

2008-02-04T03:04:00.000+10:30

Week 1:

What we did:
As a group we met with Jason Duncan, Ubalt Webmaster, Office of University Relations, to discuss the plan, goals, roadmap for our CD project. He suggested that we focus on graduate admissions.

At Jason's suggestion we will be meeting with Wendy Bolyard, Director of the Office of Graduate Admissions.

We divided Contextual Design into three parts to read and outline.

What we have planned:

1. Meet on Monday to discuss what we want to learn from the meeting with Wendy. Discuss possible questions we will have for her.

2. Meet with Wendy Bolyard on Tuesday, Feb. 5th.

3. Read and outline our assigned sections of Contextual Design.

Contextual Design Independent Study --- Spring 2008

2008-02-04T03:02:00.000+10:30

This blog will now be used for the Contextual Design Independent Study of Becca, Troy, and Liz -- Spring 2008.

Seventh Week

2007-12-06T07:15:00.000+10:30

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

We have been working on our finalized version of the prototype, wireframes, task flows and draft presentation.

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

Continue with above and finalize by Tuesday. Present on Wednesday.

Sixth Week Post

2007-11-30T02:56:00.002+10:30

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

We completed and submitted our individual research projects and had our final prototyping session.

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

We will meet as a group today and discuss:

1. Finalizing the prototype
2. Draft the presentation outline
3. General discussion on the presentation and set the goals for the final two weeks of the semester.

Fifth Week

2007-11-27T08:18:00.000+10:30

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

We continued with our individual research.

We met prior to the 8pm session with participants to finish up the first prototype and the tasks/scenarios we wanted to play out.

We conducted the first "participatory design" session. Troy and Liz met the next day to discuss changes to the interface.

2. Outline the tasks and who is doing what in the coming week.
We will be celebrating THANKSGIVING....

We will finish our individual research (to be submitted on the 28th) and conduct the second (and final) round of participatory design" sessions on Monday the 26th.

We will meet after the session to discuss what we need to change on the prototype based on the second session.

Fourth Week Posting

2007-11-15T07:52:00.000+10:30

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

Troy and Becca met to set up tasks for first session with participants.

We conducted our first prototyping session with four participants. It was more of a contextual inquiry session where we asked the participants to complete three exercises and discuss after each.

exercise one (20 minutes):

on cards write about 1) how your finances are organized, 2) adjectives/phrases that describe how your finances are organized (more?)
- - X cards per person (marked on back to keep track)

- - use cards to create an affinity diagram as a group - ask the group to look for any themes that might have appeared

exercise two (20 minutes):

what might make the process of organizing your finances easier or more enjoyable (real or unreal)?

- - X cards per person (marked on back to keep track)

- - use cards to create an affinity diagram as a group - ask the group to look for any themes that might have appeared

exercise three (20 minutes):

Group discussion

* If all of these traits existed in a character, who would that person be? (How might that character act in X scenario?)
* Talk about how this could be done (with a device).

From this session we learned a lot about our participants, their mental models, how they approach organizing their receipts, their anxieties, and frustrations. We wanted to know what matters to them in their process.

Additionally, we wanted to see what they could bring to the table if given no restrictions on a interface's functionality.

We have conducted two more brainstorming sessions and have built the initial prototype.

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

We will conduct one more session as a group to iron out any other kinks prior to the second session with our participants on Monday the 19th.

Third Week Posting

2007-11-15T07:40:00.000+10:30

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

We have individually been working on our research.

Liz and Becca conducted ethnographic research. We had a phone interview with the most typical user of our potential tax deductible software and asked him a series of questions including:

Interview Questions:

* Do you use a PDA?
* What do you like most about your PDA?
* What do you find most challenging about your PDA?
* Tell us about some of the requirements you have when you gather receipts. This could include stuff you need, types of receipts you collect and why, and anything else you can think of.
* Tell us about a time when you lost a receipt. Did you find it again?
* Do you get reimbursed for expenses? What is the most difficult thing about that process? Have you ever had unusual delays?
* What worries you most about expenses and taxes?
* 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?
* Tell us the story of: Your last client meeting in which you payed (food, drinks, etc). (what did you do with the receipt? how did you note it then/later?)
* Tell us the story of: When you did something wrong in recording a tax exempt expense.

2. Outline the tasks and who is doing what:

Continue with individual research.

Liz will be out of the country but Troy and Becca will have a brainstorming session to set up how we want to conduct the first session with participants.

Second Week Update

2007-10-25T03:39:00.000+09:30

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:

What the goals of the first session are.
Questions to illicit information so we understand how they currently organize their tax deductible expenses.
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

2007-10-18T05:33:00.000+09:30

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

2007-10-11T13:07:00.000+09:30

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

2007-10-11T08:23:00.000+09:30

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

2007-10-04T11:38:00.000+09:30

Hey everybody! Here I am!

Notes from our pre-Kath Straub meeting

2007-10-04T11:11:00.000+09:30

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)