Wyatt's Week 9 Commentary

Busy week. We've been scheduling meetings as often as we can, and I have been trying to make it to all of them. It really is essential so we can get the whole project done in time for a good presentation. Our biggest problem at this point is putting together a presentation and eventually a paper that has everything we want to talk about, ALL represented with the data. There have been a lot of big ideas floating around the design room over the last week, and in a large regard they are just, "wouldn't this be cool," suggestions. These always scare me, because i know as soon as we make a design idea that is not represented from our data we run the risk of putting out an implementation that fails in some regard. My rule now is if any design idea comes up we need to be able to show where it emerged in the data.
This is tough because there are many good design ideas that I might like to see in our system. In most cases though these are interface issues and they don't really have a place in our system just yet. I am convinced that our project up to now is to grind in the foundations of a system; we need to see the purpose of the system, run with a few major ideas, and then worry about these other issues when they come up in future iterations.
Hopefully this next week can go smoothly and we can put the information we want both into a presentation and a paper. I am starting to get a little bummed that we are so close to being done. I feel like there is still lots of potential with this project and we could really do a lot with it given the time.

Ben's Week 9 Summary

This week we visioned, storyboarded and created a UED. also on saturday sketched our plan for our powerpoint. I participated in all of these steps. Visioning i spent time making some system specifications concrete; sketching out the way i saw people interacting with our system, through the online interface. Lots of meetings everyday. Making the UED was good. But i think that it needs to be in a better more presentable form, so i;m going to do that tonight. When planning for the presentation (and the paper) we got our structure from the breakdowns, or the issues we saw, this came about because it helped us out in our visions to look at problems and then try to imagine solutions. Saturday we used the affiinity wall to pick out all the individual pieces of data that corresponded to one of our 7 main issues... We are continuing to work, and i must continue now...
Finding the balance between assigning people things, and doing them myself. It seems somehow that people are not spending time doing productive things... am i lying to myself in thinking that i have been doing such things?

Bryan's Week 10 commentary

The past week has seen the group meeting almost everyday and making more progress than ever. The primary focus has been storyboarding an visioning. We hoped that this would help focus our design ideas and eliminate any ideas that arn't supported by the data.
One idea that Ben came up with was audio and video of the lectures that could be synced with the online lecture slides. His argument is that it would allow each student to see the professors gestures that one might miss out on or not be able to capture while taking conventional notes. I think the idea in itself is a great one, I just don't know if it's too futuristic to really be taken seriously by the class or professor. However, the more and more i think about it, he only part that seems to present a problem is storing an entire quarter worth of video data.
Ideas like these all seem to follow the idea that the more detailed information the system can make available to the student about the class, the better it will be. To me, the only issues standing in the way of making the system implementable are technological ( needing a light weight notebook with a digital pen for example). The idea itself works so well with the work practice of studying most students have, making it only a matter of time before technology can catch up to the point to make the idea feasible.
What remains in the project is finalizing the design and working the kinks out of our proposed design, and putting together our presentation for Wednesday. The group did the UED over the weekend when I couldn't be around so I'll be excited to see if it helps us decide move quickly and productively in one direction for a change.

Jill's week 9 commentary

This has been an extremely busy and productive week. Earlier in the week, we had been reinspired as we begun our visioning process. We were eager to manipulate our ideas and the importance of each implementation for our design. I drew up some conceptual pictures for each vision that we created, which seemed to help our group have a common understanding. Ben also drew some pictures that captured ideas for how our project would work on the screen. Though these pictures might seem like the interface, we look at them as the physical space on our working space-- the desktop. We each contributed to the storyboarding process by drawing different sequences of events that may occur.
During class on Thursday, we met up with one of the TAs for guidance. We showed her what we have already accomplished and explained to her what we intend to do next. She gave us specific advice on what to focus on and to clarify, but in general it seemed like she approved our status of this project's timeline. Maybe she was being extra nice, but I feel like it was exactly what our group needed-- to be reassured that we were along the right track. She offered to let us practice our presentation with her before the real thing, which I think will be beneficial to us.
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the last two meetings because I needed to go home for the weekend, but I am excited to see the progress that my team had made this weekend. I know we are trying to fill in the gaps of what we are missing, and I was told that we made significant progress on the UED. We have planned to meet everyday this week to finalize our presentation and begin the write-up of our paper.

Andrew Alexander wk9 Commentary

What a busy week! Week 9 was filled with visioning, storyboarding, UED, and presentation work. All of the aforementioned processes proved to be very beneficial to the development of our design and I am confident that we have produced something that Prof. Hollan and the rest of our class will find interesting.
We met pretty much everyday this week with the exception of Sunday. The beginning of the week was focused on the finalization of our design ideas. However, the hardest part about this was using the data to drive the design. When you grasp the work practice really well and have a good idea of how it should be represented it is easy to stray from the data. Luckily, we maintained focus and came up with some data-driven designs that are sure to create a new and subsequently more efficient work practice. I suggested to the group that the best way to do this would be to look at our affinity wall and identify all of the general breakdowns in the context of learning. We did this and isolated about ten, with around half being very important to the study. Then we went through our data and identified which user provided what data that illustrated these breakdowns. This data-base of problem organized data will surely help with the presentation and paper. We then went through each of our work issues and mapped solutions onto them. The ultimate product is a system design that solves all of the major issues in learning and studying that we have seen throughout the quarter. I am starting to wish that our design was already a product so I could use it for my upcoming finals.
Saturday was a long day. We met from 12 noon to 7 pm to finish up the UED, finalize our design solutions and structure the powerpoint. I hope that the presentation will go a lot better than our last one. Also, I found the UED to be an extremely helpful tool, it is truly amazing how some parts of the Contextual Design process seem so trivial and useless until you actually complete them. Then you take a step back and realize how helpful they really are.
Our presentation is on Wednesday so this week is meetings to finalize the presentation, work on the paper, and compilation of all data and processes in the binder. Wish us good luck!

Matt's 4th Commentary

This week has been the busiest. I've met with people in my group everyday this week aside from Sunday and had a 6-7 hour meeting on Saturday. I kind of wish I had written down a summary of what happen in each meeting as I spent more time than I have memory. Over the course of the week, we visioned, storyboarded, made the UED, and started our presentation.

Visioning and storyboarding produced some mixed results. Visioning without criticism was great, but when we tried visioning with criticism, people would get into in depth discussions of the problems with an idea. And nearly all our idea's had many possible problems. Storyboarding was done partially by individuals at home and produced a few holes in the story that needed to be filled, and I think it had few benefits over simply writing the new system story with a few pictures when necessary, which I think we will be doing anyway.

The UED was a bit shaky at first since it was originally difficult to tease apart UI issues and system structure issues. After I recommended we do it exactly as the book did it and proposed four simple focus areas, everyone there smoothly produced the rest of the UED, and I also typed our progress. This far into the quarter, many people, including myself, have forgotten what exactly the book recommends since we did our book commentaries and took the midterm more than a few weeks ago. I think it's important to remember that what the book recommends has worked and there is a thin line between modifying a process to meet needs and creating a new process because the original was forgotten. It's also important to remember that small and seemingly insignificant parts of a process can be crucial to efficiency. It's funny how easy it is to get caught up in our own breakdowns.

The presentation was started by simply discussing the questions posted by Hollan as I typed up what anyone, including myself, said. This produced some mixed results as it was difficult for the team to verbally answer all of the questions on the spot and without our affinity or models on hand. This will be an important consideration for writing the paper. On a later day, we gathered our most important issues, solutions, and pieces of supporting data and put them into slides. We will finish this off on Monday so we can practice and refine over Tuesday and Wednesday.

Matt's 3rd Personal Commentary

This week I met with a few people on Friday and with nearly everyone over the course of Sunday. In those meetings, we finished off the consolidated sequence models and the last little bit of the affinity, and started the visioning process. Because of a dam cold that seems to be floating around, I missed a meeting on Tuesday and Thursday.

On Friday, a few of us met up without much direction. Some of us looked at our consolidated models and some of us gravitated toward the affinity. Ultimately, we ended up working on the last few details of the affinity. This was somewhat difficult as the last few post-its were the least understood. Some information was re-organized in a way that might be useful to us later and other information was removed or placed somewhat awkwardly into a category if we deemed that information not essential to our design. It's important to recognize the point of diminishing returns, and I think we may have only slightly pasted that point as our affinity has been quite useful for future understanding of our users.

On Sunday, I met with a few people at the beginning of the day and the rest of the team showed up a few hours later. At the beginning of the day we worked the consolidated sequence models and then started on visioning. I enjoyed visioning as I and the rest of the team felt really productive doing it. Everyone had a lot of idea's to propose, nearly all of which were generated from the affinity wall and most of which seem like they might be pretty cool. This seemed to remind the team why we had decided to do a project on this subject in the first place and to refresh a few people's interest in the project, myself included.

Over the next week, we are going to get as far along as we can, and really try for some prototyping, which will require a lot meetings and logistical gymnastics. Since I am much healthier now, I am planning on being at all those meeting and running as many prototyping sessions as I can. Towards the end of the week, we will be starting our presentation and therefore our paper. It's going to take a good amount of time, but judging for our visioning session, we will be presenting some very interesting ideas about improving the work of students.