Today we found out what projects we would be working on, and who our groups would be. It’s no easy task putting 36-odd people into 5 projects and getting the balance of skills, desires and personalities in line.
I was pleased to get the Alzheimers project, as it was my first choice. Our team consists of Lina, Abby, Joyce, Renee, Daniel, Grace and me, of course! We had completed a survey saying what project we wanted to do and what our skills were (and, oddly, who we wanted to work with) and things were pretty well aligned.
After getting the project and our team, we went straight into a Lean UX workshop. The problem with this was we weren’t all on the same page about what the project is, what the problem we needed to solve was and who would do what.
One of the exercises was to devise our proto-personas. Aside from Abby, we all took from our personal experience with Alzheimers and created personas who we related to. Abby took the path of the admin person from the organisation, which was a great angle to follow. Getting all our assumptions down on post-its was handy for the next part, affinity mapping.
I’m getting pretty used to affinity mapping now. It a process that I’ve used for years, just on paper, and I didn’t know it had a name. In the past, I’d write every good,bad or sticky issue I could think of on a bit of paper with no order, just a mind dump. Then I would go through and give them a number based on what category they fell into, then make another list of the categories, then order the issues in terms of what I considered their importance. Affinity mapping is pretty much the same thing.
We went to the white board and started dumping our post-its. This frustrated me a little, as I thought we needed to start with some order (like words as they arose so we had a clearer idea of what to put where), but everyone seemed to enjoy getting everything on the board, then trying to order things. Ok! I just went with it.
Having a range of people working on an affinity map means as many different orders as there are replies. I think better managing the roles, like identifying ONE of TWO people to organise the map and facilitate the discussion of what goes where would have really helped us out.
Abby was really keen to move onto the next exercise, to answer our problem statement. After reviewing the brief we had, I tried to angle to conversation towards what I could see as the users of the proposed site, people like home-based carers or family members who are struggling with a loved one with Alzheimers or a person in the early stages of Alzheimers who wants to know what to expect…but the conversation got stuck on the term “accessibility” and was driven to nurses, architects and urban planners. These are all fields that have specialised information available to them to deal with accessibility issues. So I took a back seat, and let that all play out.
I think it would have been easier if we had been given like 1/2 hour to do some actual research, so we understood the organisation we were paired with, and we could break down the brief better.
We sat back down, and I asked everyone what they would like to focus on. Grace wanted to do UI/Interaction design, Abby wanted to do UI/research, Daniel wanted to do UI/UX and research, Renee wanted to do research, Lena wanted to do research and Joyce and I were easy, describing ourselves as whores who would move about wherever we were needed.
Im not sure if it was because of personality clashes or too many alphas in the group, but Joyce decided to leave and join the Story group. Sad, but I totally get it.
We made a rough plan for who would look into what and decided to have a dump doc that we could put our research into. Lena got the Canadian and Australian sites, Daniel got the US and UK sites, Renee got the designing for dementia and the NZ web accessibility standards and I got the NZ site. We agreed to review the information and add it to this dump doc.
Abby, Daniel and I planned to meet the following day at 12…we didn’t really have an agenda, but thought it would be smart to get on top of it all.
Fingers crosses!
Jeremiah Boniface 