Summary of third meeting and tasks for the next time

Today we were looking at your personas and I was talking about the scenario-based design, organizing participatory design sessions about the scenarios and documenting the results using concept maps. You can find the presentations here:

• Scenario-based design
• Concept mapping

For additional reading I would recommend this chapter:

Rosson, M. B., & Carroll, J. M. (2002). Scenario-Based Design. In J. A. Jacko & A. Sears (Eds.), The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications (pp. 1032–1050). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (.pdf)

For the next time you have three group assignments and one individual assignment. Group assignments are about creating a set of scenarios (GA 3.1), organizing a design session and writing a summary of it (GA 3.2), and creating a concept map of your system (GA 3.3). There is also an individual assignment about commenting the scenarios from one group (IA 1).

Next time we are going to work on paper prototypes. For that you will need a good sketching pen and scissors. I am using Faber-Castell Ecco Pigment 0.6 fibre tip pen for my own prototyping work.

Our next meeting will take place on Thursday 13.03 at 12.00-15.00 in T-412.

New rooms

Our next meetings will take place in new rooms:

• Friday 28.02 at 12.00-15.00 in S-244
• Thursday 13.03 at 12.00-15.00 in T-412
• Thursday 27.03 at 12.00-15.00 in T-412
• Thursday 24.04 at 12.00-13.30 in A-544
• Thursday 08.05 at 12.00-13.30 in A-544

Some notes from our second meeting

I’m posting some notes from our meeting yesterday. After the groups presented the results of contextual inquiry, I introduced the persona method for representing different user types. Have a look at the presentation and example personas from some projects (LeContract, Sakai).

You can read more about the persona method from the following book chapter:

Cooper, A., Reimann, R., & Cronin, D. (2007). Modeling Users: Personas and Goals. In: About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design (3rd ed.) (pp. 75–108). Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Additional readings are in our shared Dropbox folder. A few students have not sent me their Dropbox e-mail yet. Please contact me for getting access to the shared Dropbox folder.

Before our next meeting you have to complete Group Assignment 2.1: Personas. Please post your personas by Wednesday 26.02.

Next time I would like to have short presentations about the contextual inquiry and personas from these groups who didn’t present their work yesterday:

• Reuse before Recycle
• Crowdsourcing political forecasting for tourism
• Don’t waste food

Yesterday I didn’t really have a chance to give personal feedback to group projects. In the coming days I will leave some additional comments to the contextual inquiry blog posts. If your group needs assistance at any point of time, please contact me and we can arrange a short meeting.

Please note that next time we will meet on Friday 28.02, not on Thursday. We will also move to larger rooms. I will post the room numbers next week.

One more project idea

We have one more project idea from Sandra and Ott waiting for your suggestions: Don’t waste food.

Contextual inquiries

So far I have received the contextual inquiries from 8 projects:

• Sustain IT (Arman, Tea, Ülleli)
• Project ESTER (Kärt, Jane, Irina)
• Children from Above (Antra, Eduardo, Gabriel)
• Inside the Tribal Experience (Nansy, Astra, Kadri-Liis)
• Pubbing.eu (David, Marcel)
• Smart Shopping Service (Taavi, Sofio)
• Certificate module for LMS (Tuuli)
• Dippler learning analytics (Stina)

On Thursday we will start with a short 2…3 presentation about the main findings of contextual inquiry from each group. I will just show your blog post when you are talking about the contextual inquiry. If you feel that you need a few slides to support your talk, then please embed or link the presentation to your blog post — we do not have time to change laptops.

How to follow blogs more effectively

You have been very active this week in giving feedback to other groups. As there are 11 project blogs in addition to my course blog, it takes some effort to follow the blogs. I have set up two different online tools that should help you in that.

Netvibes is personalized web dashboard. I have created a shared dashboard where you can follow blog posts in one tab and comments in another tab: http://www.netvibes.com/ifi7156

EduFeedr is a small prototype that I have developed together with my colleagues for supporting the coordination of blog-based courses. It is more suitable for courses where all learners use their personal blog and only one assignment takes place at a time. In our course I don’t use EduFeedr for managing assignments, but only for aggregating blog posts and comments. The course feed page shows 10 most recent blog posts and comments: http://www.edufeedr.net/pg/edufeedr/view_educourse/71485

Those of you who prefer to use their personal RSS feed reader can download OPML files from EduFeedr’s participants page. OPML files enable you to subscribe to all course blogs and all comment feeds at once using Feedly or some other RSS feed reader.

Update on group projects

I am currently in the process of commenting your project ideas. This post is a short update on the current status of the projects. I have received 11 project ideas:

• Sustain IT (Arman, Tea, Ülleli)
• Project ESTER (Kärt, Jane, Irina)
• Children from Above (Antra, Eduardo, Gabriel)
• Inside the Tribal Experience (Nansy, Astra, Kadri-Liis)
• Crowdsourcing political forecasting for tourism (Abdullah, Laura)
• Pubbing.eu (David, Marcel)
• smartshoppingservice (Taavi, Sofio)
• Reuse before Recycle (Jinesh)
• People feel like visitors in forest (Kristi)
• Certificate module for LMS (Tuuli)
• Dippler learning analytics (Stina)

All of the proposed project ideas are relevant and accepted for this course, although some of the projects are quite large. In this case you will focus on a smaller subset of the project in later design phases.

There are still three participants who do not have a project idea. I suggest that you should join some of the existing groups, preferrably those with just one member. I will contact you via e-mail about this.

11 group projects is much more than I expected for this course. Last year we had only three projects. I suggest that it is enough for individual assignment 1 if you write meaningful feedback to only these 5 projects that provoked most thoughts in your head. I will edit the individual assignment 1.

Project ideas

Here is a list of project ideas that I have received so far:

• Sustain IT (Arman, Tea, Ülleli)
• Dippler learning analytics (Stina)
• Pubbing.eu (David, Marcel)
• Certificate module for LMS (Tuuli)
• Children from Above (Gabriel, Antra, Eduardo)
• Crowdsourcing political forecasting for tourism (Abdullah, Laura)
• Project ESTER (Jane, Kärt, Irina)

During this week you should look at all of the project ideas and try to give constructive feedback through the comments (Individual Assignment 1: Commenting the project ideas).

Those groups that have already found their topic and posted the project idea can start working with the contextual inquiry (Group assignment 1.3).

Today is the last day to enroll to the courses through ÕIS. After I have received the final list of participants I will check that all participants have found groups. If there are any other groups then please post a link to your project idea into the comments of this post.