We ran through the first draft of our final presentation yesterday. While we think we have a solid concept, our presentation of that concept still has some way to go before next Wednesday’s final presentation. We are grateful for all the helpful feedback that we received from Chris, Vanessa, and our classmates.
If you’d like to see our work-in-process, click here to download the full presentation (2.3 MB).
Some of the key comments we received:
- We need a better argument at the very beginning; it is still unclear
- Need a more consistent opportunity and goals from beginning to end
- Have the screenshots and video sketch come earlier in the presentation, so people have visuals
- The overview of our research methods took up too much time
Stay tuned… the final presentation of Cumulus is coming up in less than one week!
Prepping for our video sketch
We were lucky to find two great guys to help us out by posing in photos for our scenario video sketch: Juergen and Tiago.
Our scenario revolves around Professor Jonathan Cooper, who is trying to achieve tenure and needs to publish a few more papers in the upcoming year. During the scenario, we find out how Cumulus helps him to reach his goal by proactively linking Jonathan with Javier, another researcher working in a similar field. The moral of the story? Cumulus makes connections between people happen that they would not have found on their own! Want to hear more? You can download our script here.
Below are a few photos from our shoot. With Pittsburgh’s unpredictable stormy weather, we were lucky to have a few hours of sunshine, which made for some great photos.
The scene where Jonathan finds Javier at a conference using Cumulus' mobile app
Professor Jonathan Cooper (played by Juergen)
Professor Javier DeSilva (played by Tiago)
April 20: Usability testing with Participants
After presenting our refined solution (see the April 12 post), we wanted to move ahead into usability testing of our wireframes as soon as possible. So, we quickly cranked out some more wireframes and conducted a testing session with high-fidelity, paper prototypes, and 3 helpful participants.
You can view a detailed post about our testing session here.
Feel free to download a pdf of this presentation as well!
Based on our collage sessions and personal experience, we built a model that begins to show the complexities involved in research. A researcher begins with an array of assumptions and potential directions. In order to choose between them, she speaks with professors and peers, and searches for papers and books to provide inspiration. Some of her peers will connect the researcher to other people, and provide further connections. The added connections help to narrow down her ideas. But because she’s depending on limited resources, she may miss relevant connections to other researchers. Researchers currently spend a great deal of time creating and looking for relevant connections.
This current model shows us how researchers are utilizing various resources to gain access to the vast amounts of information. We can’t begin to address how people research without thinking about the entry point into the information stream.
Our most recent presentation
Please feel free to download the Concept Presentation here
One of the three concepts we chose to pursue was an improvement on the standard bulletin boards found around campus. We had some information about them based on previous surveys, but wanted to test their effectiveness more directly. To this end we decided to examine two different points -the quantity of outdated material on the boards and the response rate to posted advertisements.
We first went through all the ads on several boards around campus collecting all the out of date information. On average, each board had 70 postings that were out of date, with some of these more than six months old. The extreme clutter produced, in part, by the outdated material made it extraordinarily difficult for any individual ad to stand out.
Everyone likes free pizza!
To test the response rate, we posted 8.5″ x 11″ ads offering free pizza to anyone who volunteered to take a quick survey. We left the ads up for 72 hours, but found that some were covered by newer postings within the first 24 hours. Even so, there were 9 tabs torn from the ads (out of 40 total) when we collected them the morning before our survey/pizza session. Not a very good indicator for the effectiveness of bulletin boards.
At the actual pizza/survey session only two students showed up. This gave us very little actual data, but strong anecdotal evidence that the boards were not particularly effective. While the tepid response may have been due, in part, to concurrent midterm exams, there are obviously problems with the boards as they are now.
Creating ideas is all fun an good, but all those ideas don’t always stand up on heir own! Our next step was to weed down the weak ones and let the strong ones shine through. This process would have been difficult if we relied on pure opinion, fortunately with the little help of some structure, we were able to take each concept and grade it according to two types of specific criteria. As a group we then took the task of evaluating each concept together and giving a value to each of these criteria.
These 2 criteria were:
Technical Feasibility – How difficult is it to do this, does it require special development, is it using current technology, or does it require new technology not yet available.
Market potential – How does this fit into the market, is it something many people will want, is it costly to produce, is it going to create a large impact.
These two criteria were measured on a scale from 1-10 , which resulted in each concept having a two number score. After completing the process of ranking or grading each concept we were able to look at the set in a more decisive way. We also used these value to map the concepts along a graph of potential vs technological/resource “cost”.
As we mapped the concepts, we also outlined an area that we selected as optimal. This area of the graph highlights concepts which were not too overly complicated or costly or out of reach technologically, and were of high potential or impact. By drawing this container, we were able to quickly gauge the number of concepts with overall high potential for development.
Lastly in our evaluative process, we as each voted for what we thought were our top 3 concepts, primarily to see if we were all aligned, but also to highlight the importance of the team developing an idea that they are not only confident in pursuing, but that they are passionate about pursuing.
Creating the foundation of ideas
After wrapping up our research and initial touchstone tours, it was time to begin the most exciting parts of developing a project; the ideation phase. We began this phase by trying to create concept matrices that allowed us to focus specific type of ideas around possible stakeholders and specific problem settings. This process started out with much enthusiasm, however half way down the line we suffered a bit of a bubble burst. Our concept matrix was simply too ambiguous and it was making our ideas far to generic.
The reason for some of these problems was that we stumbled on the fact that our market or area of focus was still out of focus! After some conversation with our professors and some much needed reflection as a team we redrew the matrix and got some much needed clarity.
The end result was a matrix that allowed us to think of school stakeholders and the type of communications they engage in, and hopefully with these two areas we created room for some creativity.
Bellow is an image of the final set of concepts in the matrix.
Conceptual matrix no.2
Close up of the concept matrix
Concept matrix no.2 close up
