Planning & Prep

Week 2 (Jan 21–25, 2019)

Now that we’re acquainted with each other and our project, Advita, Neha, Maggie, Peng, and I got a chance this week to dive deeper into research and kickoff planning. We’ve divided our exploratory research into four categories — Bloomberg background, machine learning, training data, and industry context. This way, we divide our time and make sure we get to everything we want to learn about at this stage of the project. Our kickoff date is set for February 4th, and we’re excited to get insights and demos straight from our contacts at Bloomberg as well!

One big highlight of the week for us was getting to talk to our contacts for the first time via video chat. We introduced ourselves to our sponsors, heard about their roles in the company, and learned a bit more about the task we’ll be working with in the coming months. A couple important insights included that the company has an existing centralized platform to create annotation tasks (although not everyone uses it!), and ML has a huge impact on tasks and publications all over the organization. That makes data labeling important, difficult to standardize, and a super interesting problem for us to help tackle. As an added bonus, sneaking in this meeting means we’ll need less time for introductions at our kickoff meeting next week — and have more time to discuss questions the call raised about directions early-stage research.

Maggie and Peng closed out the week on Friday by attending a design thinking workshop with Etsy, which gave us some new and helpful ways of looking at our project scope. From an empathy map exercise, for example, they realized that we as a team don’t know very much about our users, Bloomberg data annotators. Definitely something we can bring up with our contacts in the coming weeks — maybe we’ll facilitate an empathy mapping exercise with our sponsors! Other exercises they went through included thank you letters from the perspective of the user, customer journey maps, and speculative design. More to come in a detailed post about the workshop from Maggie & Peng.

Overall, we’ve leapt away from the setup phase and into the beginnings of some great generative research. More to come next week!