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!