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.