Week 6 Commentary Sunday 5/13

This week we met on Tuesday as usual in Calit. The group did a few interpretation sessions on some interviews from the past weekend writing up the coresponding work models but there were still more interviews that need to be done. I came late due to class. The group met on Thursday morning but i had other commitments and could not be there.
The most productive meeting we had this week took place this afternoon (Sunday). All but one of us were there and we had plenty of time to talk about things and not try to rush through the sessions like we do during the week. We started the session by going over the second of my two interviews (user 8) and writing out models for it. After this was done everyone was present and we lost a little bit of focus for a while. We then listened through my first interview (which was the first interview we tried to interpret and was not done well) and wrote out the most salient pieces of data on the board instead of doing an entire session for the 30 minute interview again.
After doing this we were talking about the presentation on Thursday when Andy brought up the point that the information we were getting from our interpretation sessions seemed to be spread across all the models and each interview, and that wasn't easy to see it all, let alone try to find common themes. He liked what we did with my first interview( that is pulling out the most important things) and suggested that we do that same process for each of the other interviews that had already been interpreted. Everyone agreed that it was a good idea and also that each person should post both the notes they took during the interview, and the salient data points form the interview that we began calling the "Interpretation notes," to our wiki so they could be accessed by everyone at any time. We decided that the Interpretation notes would make building the affinity diagram easier and the fact that all the information would be online would not make us dependent on one person with hard copies of notes.
We also got a chance to Interpret 2 of Natan's interviews and make some models for those as well. Natan even found a way to make the models on the computer with Visio so they could be posted to the Wiki as well under the appropriate user.
As much headway as we made today, we decided to meet Monday evening to try and prepare for Tuesday's presentation and do any remaining interpretation sessions. The plan for the coming week is to build the affinity diagram and the consolidated work models. We also came to the conclusion today that we may not have enough time to develop a working paper prototype. We may instead have to settle for a more general type of design and conduct interviews which would give the interviewee a description of the design.