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.