UXDI: GURU for the NYC DOE
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I was assigned to a group with Jessica Altounian and Nicholas Tejada. We were given the project guidelines and began our process by discussing our strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons from our experiences, and started out by delegating tasks and coming up with an initial timelines. Jessica was chosen as our Project Manager, and Nicholas was to produce and I would lead the design process and prototyping.
We spent the next several hours coming up with concepts. We started out thinking about Location based services, throwing out ideas like a Bus Locator, or Phone Locator through i-watch. Then we realized that Jessica and I were both former educators, so we considered some ideas based on our teaching experience. After several hours we had several dozen ideas spread out on our notecards, and we were able to speak with Alex about them.
Alex gave us some great feedback and we were able to isolate our ideas into 4 different concepts. We had an idea for a Hilton Rewards App that rewarded users for reporting problems directly to them rather than going to social media. We also thought of an idea for rearranging classrooms, desks, placements, etc for teachers. Another idea was an Augmented Reality Pokeman Go concept for Carnival cruise line, to give passengers a more active treasure hunt activity for both the island tours and the ship itself. Finally we had an idea for a Painting Planner for HomeGoods or Pier 1, where you take a photo of your room and can visually see how the picture looks before going to buy it.
We wrote our findings in the project template, and were excited to submit our ideas, feeling confident in all four ideas incase our primary choice was rejected.
Tuesday… decisions
On Tuesday we came in at 8:30 to talk about the proposals together, and Alex informed us that we wont find out any decisions until 10:30am, so we decided to consider our screener/survey questions as well as target audiences. We came up with the type of information we would look at for all 4 ideas, and then Jessica started writing up the surveys, while Nick looked into augmented reality apps that would allow us to mock up some ideas. I looked into existing apps and the competitive landscapes as we awaited the decisions on our Project.
In our planning we had anticipated getting acceptance or rejections so that we could focus our time on just one of the ideas, but in the absence of that possibility we decided to do our research on all 4 ideas incase any of them were chosen. We did get our response around 11 am, and we were told that our initial idea was rejected. The good news was our 2nd and 3rd ideas had merit, and could be accepted with some modification. We looked at the Education idea and spent about an hour looking at the pros and cons. We decided to forgo the idea in favor of Carnival Cruise lines. We figured it would be too difficult to consider the NYC Dept. of Education as a client. Carnival cruise lines is a bigger market, and the idea was a bit more ‘sexy’.
After spending two hours researching Carnival cruise lines, its website, its app, and its competitors… we were beginning to see very serious holes in our new idea. We didn’t want to do “Augmented Reality” just to do it because its the new fad, it had to actually fit our idea and solve a problem. We weren’t convinced that it was doing that. Essentially we were putting lipstick on a pig, with that pig being the idea of an additional rewards system for Carnival’s passengers.
When Dafna arrived we spoke to her about our ideas, and were given the boost we needed in discussing Carnival. Even though it was 4pm on Tuesday, we were re-energized to rethink our idea. We had a lightbulb moment when the two former teachers on our team discussed “Substitute Plans”, and bam we got our idea. We both know full well that there is a severe need for this problem to be solved, and we were excited to get started. We spent the next two hours ideating and writing the proposal, as well as writing out the Survey questions. Everything was flowing well. We went home at 7pm with the job of sending out our surveys to teachers. We didn’t have to send out a screener because we knew so many teachers in our network.
When we came in the next morning Jess got us together to break down what our goals were for the next day. We had already sent out our Surveys to our entire network of teachers, and were happily surprised to have over 50 Responders. We knew that we had pinups the next morning and we had to have our questions, project plan, research plan, and survey questions ready by then.
I took it upon myself to do the competitive analysis as well as put together the interview questions with Nick.
This while Jessica put together the first draft of the research report and printed out the Google Forms results from our surveys. I also ended up doing 5 separate teacher interviews and 1 administrator interview since I knew so many from my previous jobs.
The Design Studio lecture by Andrew gave us the guidance we needed to get the ball rolling on the basic creatives. We already knew some ideas we had expressed verbally, but the sketches brought our ideas together and we saw some holes that we could potentially fill.
We had a lot of work to do, but I was going to Chicago over the weekend, and Jessica was spending the weekend with her husband before he went off to China for a month. We did delegate tasks though despite real life interference. I was able to do the Heuristics report, the three personas, and some user flows all over the weekend. A delay at O’Hare airport helped me get a good deal of that work completed.
WEEK TWO
Coming back on Monday, we found out that Jessica was sick and wasn’t going to be able to come in at all. We spoke to her on Skype, and set her on one single project: putting the research report together. While this was being done by her at home, Nick and I started sketching. I started doing tech research by seeing what our limitations were with using proto.io or InVision for our prototype.
On Tuesday we had lectures, but after that we all got together and began to work on our Medium Fidelity prototype because we had to have everything ready to go for our Wednesday Morning “Can You Build It?” presentation with the developers. Nick and I worked till closing on the medium fidelity prototype, and thank goodness we did, because we were up first in the morning.
We did our presentation to the Developers and got varied feedback on timing, but overall there were no problems with the actual development of the app. It was fairly easy to make, with variables based on how complex we want to get with it.
MEDIUM FIDELITY PROTOTYPE:
Wednesday and Thursday were late nights. Nick and I chugged ahead on the high fidelity on Wednesday night after doing lots of testing on the medium fidelity version.
Some changes based on feedback were the logo, the on-boarding screens were completely discarded in favor of a faster and smoother user flow.
I did logo, photoshop, and icon changes, as well as all the inVision prototyping to make sure everything got done and was working for Friday. We chose our App color scheme, as well as different colors for each subject, all with the idea that users should be able to locate and identify thier plans in seconds.
We talked about doing an iPad version for Friday, but at midnight on Thursday the most important thing was getting the decks printed and ready.
GURU PROTOTYPE:
Here is the final version of our GURU prototype:
CLIENT MEETING
Going into the meeting I was making final InVision changes to the iPad version even going into the meeting. Given that the iPad version was going to be used to supplement the presentation and not take it over, I wanted to make sure it was working correctly. We went in to see that it was Dafna and another woman we hadn’t met before. We introduced ourselves and took them through our application. We gave them color copies of both of our decks, and after prompting, we set up the scenario. Our app was designed to be used by three different personas, but we chose to set up the teacher persona. Neither of our clients had ever taught before, but they were able to understand the problem and the need being filled by our app. Some of the navigation was a bit confusing due to inVision prototype limitations such as the side scrolling. We were told that we shouldn’t have two side scrollers directly on top of one another. We also discovered that some of the feedback we were receiving was specifically about our lesson plan content, which we didn’t actually create but rather cut and pasted from the Dept. of Ed lesson plans. We wanted to make sure it was understood that we were not actually creating the education lessons. There was some valuable feedback we got about the color layout and the fonts. We should have made that page more complete by adding HexTags, and Font sizes. But overall we came out impressed as we were told that with minor changes here and there this project was ready to be presented to the Department of Education.
CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS
Coming out of our meeting with the clients, we received some very good and important feedback. We understood that we need to add more NYCDOE branding to the app, and the possibility of adding a bottom nav bar to the UI made a lot of sense. We chose to create an InVision version for the iPad to help with our presentation but we would need to revise those screens to make it designed native on the iPad.
Considering the scale of the project and the time we were given, I think all three of us on the team were quite proud of what we accomplished. When showing our project to teachers and friends, it was nearly unanimous praise with a lot of great quotes like:
“Oh wow I wish I had this when I taught (or subbed).”
“Are they really making this app? Can I download it now?”
“You know how many times I could have used something like this?”
All of the users we tested it on or showed it to were either teachers, subs, or school administrators, so we had a very specific target in mind when we designed the app. When showing it to people who never taught before in the public school system, it wasn’t as easy for them to instantly understand the need, but for our target it was universal. We developed an app to solve a very real problem, and if this were developed, it would go a long way towards solving it. When you consider that it solves a problem with educating our young minds, it makes it all more important.
