Assignment 1 first thoughts

The brief/outline:

Three Product Design Exercises 13/12 (30%)

You will be  introduced to industry partners and work in teams  on the following projects. Although these are  group projects, your grade will be based on assessment of individual  contribution to the teamwork.  Your contribution will be based on your  role within the team, final presentation, output and  process documentation on your blog. The assessment criteria include:

1. Critical application of techniques and tools covered in class
2. Creative strategies to address industry challenges
3. Visual and interactive quality
4. Evidence of progress, reflection and critical thinking in your web-blog

This project will run from 25 November until 13 December. You will team up with developers from the software development course on 25 November at 2pm. Each team will work with a development process where you will manage a sprint, creating user stories and a design-development workflow, design wireframes and user flows, test your designs with users and stakeholders, and create high-fidelity mockups.

Important dates

25 November 2pm: Meet up with the team

26 November 10am: Meet the client

5 December 10am: Retrospective+ schedule a demo with your industry partner

12 December 9am: Final Presentation

EXERCISE 1:

• 19/11-26/11: Research and plan a workshop to include the team in the problem definition and ideation .
• 26/11-29/11: Gather insights from the workshop to create and test wireframes, user-flow, and user stories.

EXERCISE 2:

• 29/11-5/12: Create high-fidelity mockups and deliver assets to developers.
• Test the wireframes, iterate design and communicate these changes with your team.

EXERCISE 3:

• 6/12-12/12: Work on the final prototype with the developers, and prepare for the final presentation. Submit the slides and final report with the developers – make sure that your work is under UX & UI chapters.

---

So some thoughts. I’ll have to get really up to speed with the end-to-end agile process…I’ve been reading about lean UX and really loving that way of thinking about products. We did an assignment in class with a sprint, and it has some awesome resources on its site. So that’s somewhat exciting.

Cos I’m like that, the problems come to my head straight away. These will be large groups with a lot of energy. We will have to define our roles from the outset and stick to them…or respect the roles at least. My concerns around that is will everyone be as understanding of the agile way? Will they see the purpose of the sprint (it’s hard not to), but be able to stay in the confines of their role?

Maybe I worry about me doing that. Looking at the project for UX2, we are a group of 4. This will be double that, and with totally different skill sets.

The five projects on offer are:

1. Seek A Leak
We use thermal cameras and moisture detection tools to identify moisture issues. The process is currently in my head, jobs sheets are done on excel, templates are done in word and a small online invoicing package on the www. We need a new software developed to streamline the process and make it easier.

2. Alzheimer’s NZ
Alzheimers NZ represents people living with dementia at a national level by raising awareness of dementia, providing information and resources, advocating for high quality services, and promoting research about prevention, treatment, cure and care. We would like to create a website that educates people about dementia accessibility guidelines. The website will include different scenarios and there will be an ability for an admin member from our team to add scenarios in the future. The website itself should also be dementia friendly.

3. CITA
Chinese IT Association of New Zealand (CITANZ) is looking to develop membership hub to centralise their members information and streamline their membership management process; also this portal serves as a home for all our members and potentially integrate with our services and upcoming programmes. Our long-term vision is to build a reciprocal community for Chinese IT professionals across New Zealand.

4. Special Olympics
Special Olympics New Zealand (SONZ) is part of a global sports movement that provides year round sports training and athletic competition in a variety of Olympic type sports for children and adults with an intellectual disability, giving them continuing opportunities to develop physical fitness, demonstrate courage, experience joy and participate in a sharing of gifts, skills and friendships with their families, other Special Olympics athletes and the community. We have a range of stakeholders that we communicate with on a regular basis and we are looking for a plan on how to best communicate with the variety of stakeholders capabilities, ages and interests.

5. StoryMint
Story Mint is a community of writers who work together to encourage and give each other constructive feedback. Its goal is to create excellent writers using a combination of automated and personalised tools. The unique Stylefit guides writers to find the perfect pitched voice for the audience. Writers can experiment writing different genres with the serials. Writers also learn other key writing skills such as maintaining tense, writing believable dialogue and much more.

Mine, in order of preference, were: Alzheimers NZ; Special Olympics; StoryMint; CITANZ; and finally, Seek A Leak. The reasoning behind this prioritisation is that I want to work on things that matter, and Alzheimers and Special Olympics have a range of accessibility considerations that will have to be met, and this is something I haven’t really worked on before. StoryMint would be interesting, but like CITNZ, they are membership-based and in my experience, these groups can be really messy and add more features during the development, which could actually be fun in an agile framework! The Plumber is last for me as I already have a client who is a plumber and it seems a little wrong. I’m also still bummed by the failure of TradieSites.