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.