A core part of your progress on your design projects is to keep design log with regular reflective entries on your progress. Entries for your design log will also help you to fulfil one of the two major assessment components: a final version of the design log, an edited collection of all the design log entries you have been making. This article provides an overview of the prompts we set each week for you to use as basis of design log entries. But the design log is yours, so we strongly encourage you to write additional entries if and when needed. Ps: If you are unsure what makes a good design log entry, have a look here.
Note: the reflective prompts outlined for each week are due within one week after they were posted; for marking purposes, a submission within two weeks will count.
Schedule for 16/17
Please note that prompts may be updated slightly in response to our overall progress.
Week 1 (for ± 11th Oct)
- TEAM INTRODUCTION: Briefly introduce your team, the members and what you think brings you together around this project.
- DISCUSS YOUR BRIEF: describe your goals/expectations for the client meeting; what ‘digital civics’ might your project involve and what challenges do you see in relating to those civic groupings? (feel free to relate to the two pieces of reading for the first lecture)
Week 2 (due ± 18th Oct)
- USER MAPPING: With the help of the client, prepare a map that depicts a process and indicate what activities your project stakeholders engage in (or not) as part of this. Notice tensions, conflicts (in resources or views).
- Goals and aims: What are your aims and in response what questions to do you plan to cover?
- User interview & research plan: Who do you involved in your user research and what activities might you do? What other documents / evidence might you consider? (based on clients’ advice)
Week 3 (due ± 25th Oct)
- Briefly note what evidence and interviews you planned for
- As you do your user interviews, write a blog post on high level insights from for your user interviews. You can subdivide this task amongst members in your team.
- Documentation: Consider how you planned for documenting insights from your interviews? (e.g. a list of user stories?)
Week 4 (due ± 1st Nov)
- Revisit your goals: Have they changed and how?
- Report on activity: In your team, individually collate a list of products/services/devices that may serve as inspiration for your projects. Then can come from the literature or the Internet. Each member of the team should select two examples and say (1) why selected, (2) how it provides inspiration for the project. In the team, discuss the examples you came up with and note which features about interesting.
- What examples have you discussed and why?
- What of these examples has worked well and serves as inspiration for your project?
Week 5 (due 8th Nov)
- Sketch out concept ideas: Individually develop a set of alternatives. Describe your set of alternative concept ideas and discuss the potential weaknesses and limitations of each. Finally settle on a final concept you’ll go on to prototype. Discuss why and how you choose it?
Week 6 (due 15th Nov)
- Write a blog post: Develop a story board for your idea / concept (also covered in our seminar for this week) and document your progress by writing a blog post about it (about 300 words)
- Helpful reading: Truong, K., Hayes, G., & Abowd, G. D. (2006). Storyboarding: An Empirical Determination of Best Practices and Effective Guidelines (pp. 1–10). Presented at the DIS.
Week 7 (due 22nd Nov)
For this week (until 22nd November), I encourage you to think and write an entry (200 — 400 words) about either of the following:
- Reflect on the discussion with Joanna & Matthias and your story board designs, what key concerns did they mention in the deployment of their applications that might be relevant to your —> What problems do you need to address if you wanted to deploy your app with your project client? (approx. 300 words).
- Review the resources for prototyping mentioned in the module guide (section “Resources bank for your design sprint”) and write a post about what kind of tools you want to use for designing the prototype app / service? Referring to your story board, describe what you are going to build. Bare in mind you’ll present your eventual prototype to user representatives in week 9/10 to gather feedback.
Week 8 (due 29th Nov)
- Prototyping: What did you take away from this weeks lecture about prototyping? What aspect of your story board will you prototype and why? What materials, software, techniques do you plan to use to build your prototype? What level of fidelity do you aim to achieve with your prototype? Document your prototype designs to demonstrate how you successively refined your prototype to arrive at the final result.
Week 9 (due 6th Nov)
- User test preparation: Discuss how you prepare for user tests in the next week. Where and how will you run your user interviews? What questions do you answer yourself and how do you plan to evaluate the user responses to your designs?
Week 10 (anytime during week 11)
- User tests: Who were your participants and which audiences do they represent?How did they respond to the prototypes? What interesting statements did they make that help answer your project goals / questions? Did they use the prototype as intended by you? What did they note for further improvement? What would you do differently if you were to do the user test again?
Week 11 (due as part of the final design log, 13th Jan)
- Next steps: Discuss where you think your project could go next? What are the next steps for your proposition? Based on the user tests what do you think needs to change in your proposition if you were to make it a successful product?