Week 11

Studio class:
Just continued to refine all our touch points, making sure they are all cohesive and relevant to the user (using empathy). Also spent the remainder of the lesson pulling the dossier together, making sure to have all the relevant points laid out. Got some further feedback from the tutor in regards to our POV statement and central proposition. We had our initial ideas down but needed a few tweaking in some places to really get the statement flowing strong.

Week 10

We started this week off with an interim. We joined 2-3 groups from the other stream to exchange feedback. It was interesting to see everyone's ideas and how they are approaching the issue with their touch points. As our app is targeted especially for university students it was super helpful to see how the users interact with our product. In terms of our idea, they found it to be helpful for managing their university life however there were some sections where it wasn't working so they suggested ways we can alter it e.g. messaging systems for tutors and students. Although the messages are filtered for specific classes, tutors may still be bombarded with messages. So one of our users suggested to use our calendar function to show when tutors are free and the students could arrange a meeting with them face-to-face, this way they are collaborating in person. There was also an issue of readability and the size issues of things within the app. The second phase included all streams. It was more of a moment of seeing what others have done and to give and receive more feedback. It was interesting to see what stage everyone is at. I think this will help advance our project as we were able to test our app with our target audience to see what works and what doesn't.

For the second session, we had a lecture on 4th year courses and the hand in requirements for week 6. We then went back into our groups had continued to refine our idea. Over the course of the week we need to start working on our dossier and getting our ideas down in words. Through our prototyping and user testing we found that students have different needs. We need to give scenarios to show how they help different students using the 3 main functions of our app.

Week 9

There was a lecture on design thinking, linking back to empathy and understand your audience/users. The thing that I got out of the lecture is the importance of perspective and how your audience will be use or be affected by your product or service. This is something I need to remember when we refine our app, especially since our initial app design was quite busy. 

For the workshop we had to form a small team and find a solution for poverty from the perspective of a persona that they had created from their research. From the map, we decided to choose the issue of transport and how the persona struggles to carry her groceries from the supermarket and back to her house. It is also time consuming as it took about an hour each way. We came up with various solutions but the one we decided to present was a icecream-like food truck that goes to the bus stops everyday, and people will be able to purchase what they need without having to drive/or take the bus to the supermarket. The truck would have specials everyday e.g. meat, dairy, however they will always contain the necessity such as milk and bread. From this exercise, I learnt that all solutions does not need to be products but it can be a service to help with their issue. We have to look into the perspective of the user and see what suits the matter the best. Now we need to identify areas that we can improve by looking into our user perspectives - university students. 

For the second studio class we continued developing our ideas by doing more user testings. We manage to pitch our idea to tutors, students (our target audience) and some fourth years. They suggested that we really needed to work on how all touch points can be cohesive e.g. visuals, language, colours. So for the remainder of the class we tried to revise our topic a little more so we can have at least all of our touch points mocked up roughly for interim next week.

Week 8

We had a lecture on an organisation called S.K.I.P that specialises in creating solutions for issues relating to physical punishment of children. She mainly talked about using design revolution as an innovation instead of a tool for process and money, and also how the element of design can change the community. The initiative was based on the assumption that all parents love their children but other factors such as depression, stress, alcohol etc has cause them to act otherwise. Instead of focusing on recusing these children, S.K.I.P aimed to help the kids by helping the parents. Through the use of empathy, they come to understand the community by reaching out to their audience and forming a connection and trust bond with them. They also were able to get volunteers who had a similar experience to reach out to these people. She found that going out and creating these connections with her audience has changed the perspective that she initially had. She also worked with her audience to come up with an application targeted to hidden families that may not reach out to them because they are embarrassed or feels ashamed. I think I should use empathy to understand my target audience more and this might mean that my target audience can have a role in designing my prototype. Understanding what they need/want, generating new ideas that I haven't thought of as we are in different positions. I think that letting my target audience design my app will really let me learn about them in a entirely different aspect. 

We had another user-testing session in class. We joined a different group and explained what our app does and who it caters for, also a brief explanation about the scenario before the user downloads the app. After discussion, our user-testers believe that our app was too busy and had too many things going on. They suggest that we really narrow down our idea, possibly focusing on one aspect of our current app, and doing it really well. Instead of focusing on Massey students, we were suggested to only cater for first year students as they will be the ones really using the components of the app. We then presented our idea to the tutor and he believe that we should come up with 3 words that explains what our audiences needs/be interested in our app. We need to think about how we are going to capture the attention of our audiences, how are we going to persuade them to use our app? I think we should consider the importance of empathy and really trying to understand how students will look and use our app. This is something our group can look into further.

Week 7

On Monday's lecture, we had a look at different approaches to design in terms of well-being. It was particularly  interesting to see how other visual briefs were turned into concepts to improve well-being. This will be incredibly helpful in terms of generating new ideas while also getting inspired. However one example brief shown in the lecture (social media) had a similar concept to the one we had planned in the study break, so we will need to generate new concepts that are more innovative and different. There was also a lecture from lifehack where they reminded us to revise on the things we learnt from the first brief (well-being). I think this lecture was a good way to start the second brief as it was refreshing to revise the things we have learnt to keep us motivated for the new assignment. 

In class we used the spiderweb table that was introduced in the lifehack lecture. It really help unpack our topic further and narrow down on the important ideas that we may want to focus on. This was to slowly ease us into more rapid ideation for our topic. We then went on discussing how we improved our well-being in the study break, and I realised that just the simple things including more sleep and spending time with friends and family really improved my well-being. From this I learnt that the things we take for granted sometimes actually makes big differences to our well-being. For the remainder of the lesson, we revised our spiderweb table and started picking the 2 strongest idea that we wanted to carry on further. We also narrowed down our target audience from university students to specifically massey students as we are thinking of creating an app to help improve massey student's university life. Our original intention was to help university students connect with others however looking through our survey again, we realised that 80% of the responses say that students use technology mainly for uni work (especially cellphones as they are more convenient and portable). As for homework we want to find similar existing apps to help create more idea iterations, while also creating some journey maps that will pinpoint the concepts we want to explore. 


For the second half of week 7, we had another lecture on prototyping. It was a good revision to see all the different types of prototyping we can do. The two that stood out most for me was storyboarding and wireframes, particularly focusing on the user's point of view as this will be very important when it comes to user-testing.

In class we were encouraged to generate some quick prototypes under 15 minutes for user-testing. It was difficult to work under pressure however it really pushed us to think of ideas in a short time span. This was also covered in the IDO video that we watched a few weeks back, reminding us that in order to generate good ideas, we have to first come up with some unusual ideas (thinking outside the box). We originally drew wireframes for user-testing however we thought that using the "wizard of oz" method would help push our project further as we want to find out what massey students wants to see in a massey app, and what better way to test this by getting them to tell us what they want. We ended up having an iphone cutout and getting our users to tell us what they wanted to see on a Massey app. This was a very helpful exercise as we were able to get some new ideas that while also knowing that some of our existing ideas are also what others wanted. It was also reassuring to get some positive feedback from our peers and also constructive cristism that will help us improve our concepts further.

Week 6

In the weekends we were encouraged to go off and interview our audience using the matrix table "ask, learn, look, try". Our group created an anonymous survey (broad questions only) to get a general idea on what people think about technology. Since our target audience are students we only posted our survey to student forums.

Coming to class, we separated off into our groups and started unpacking our ideas further. We used post it notes to sort, label, integrate and priorities all the information we had gathered from the survey. Through this exercise we both realised that we might need to generate more broader questions to help us find the issue and target audience that we want to focus on. Over the study break we decided to form more surveys and generate more ideas for us to unpack (especially limitations which will be an important factor that we have to consider when we come up with concepts). The survey will help to progress our project further as the information will help us create some concepts that can help people with their well-being in relation to technology. It will also be interesting to see how people view technology, and how their opinions may differ to ours. 

Week 5

In the lecture today, we explored different issues and how they used visual communication design to solve these issues. One example was saving Troy library, and the designers used a strong negative approach to motivate people to wanting to save the library. They used methods such as signs (burn library books) to create awareness and people took it to their own hands from there e.g. putting the issue up on social media (social presence). 

For today's class, all the streams put out their briefs and went around taking notice of the briefs that they might want to pick up for the next assignment. After reading through many briefs, I found a few that interested me and I may take up on it, although going towards a different approach. 

On Friday, our group decided to go split up to do different topics. I eventually partnered up with another student because we were both interested in the technology brief, but wanted to explore the positive idea of technology rather than the negative. I decided on the technology brief because I find that our generation is heavily influenced on technology and we only really look at the negative side of it but never taking notice how it is improving our well-being. As a constant phone and laptop user, I find that technology has allowed me to find information quicker, contact friends from long distances, endless storage etc. Things that people take for granted sometimes. As a team, we decided to research more on technology and how it improves our well-being, while also listing possible target audiences.

Also had a look at an IDO video about a group of people with different disciplines who came together to reconstruct a shopping trolley. Their dead line was 1 week which put a lot of pressure on them but in the end they came out with great outcomes, some concepts that didn't work back then (grocery bar code detector), now exist in our supermarkets and are used daily by some people. I learnt that to generate great ideas, we first have to put in crazy ideas (thinking outside the box) without judgement, so that we can develop them further and not being too attached to one "great" idea from the start. I also took away the quote "doing then asking for forgiveness", something our group should consider for our project.