Expert Interviews & Kick-Off
Week 4: Feb 4 — Feb 8
Recap: Team Muffin/Chihuahuha worked hard on understanding the domain, the people and prepping for the kick-off with our client!
Kick-Off
After a lot of preparation, the week started off with our kick-off! We took the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the current environment and processes being carried out directly from our clients. We also tried to understand the expectations of our project. By stepping into the role of annotators during the kick-off activity, many other aspects of the project we hadn’t thought about were revealed! We discussed possible dates for our research trip and setting up weekly meetings to share our findings. The kick-off ended with a great dinner at the Porch after which our clients went back to NYC and we went back to 3SC. We powered through the remainder of the night making sense of our meeting notes, taking down questions and recording our insights.
Domain Experts’ Say
We met with two domain experts this week: Professor Eric Nyberg and Professor John Zimmerman of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. We explained the problem at hand and asked the professors for their view on it.
The professors showed enthusiasm for the project, describing their own experiences. While they pointed us towards additional academic resources to carry out further background research, they also urged us to identify where value is being exchanged and not to focus on a solution too early in the process.
Building a Research Plan
While we split up to conduct secondary interviews, we started on building a research plan, led by Maggie and Rose with support from Neha. Based on our findings, we listed out methods we felt we needed along with deliverables and tangible artifacts to share with our clients. While the research plan is not something that can always be set (because stuff happens!), it gave us a better idea of our research goals.
Synthesizing What We Knew
We finally had an understanding of the different types of annotation tools being used as well as their use-cases. We started gaining insight into the kind of people involved in the creation of the annotation tasks and involved with actually annotating the data. We had enough information to dive into creating a stakeholder map with assumed value flows.
Coincidentally, on the same day, we did an exercise during Interaction Design Studio 2 class which involved reversing and pivoting our assumptions about a problem and seeing the sort of solutions that could arise from it. As it was useful for our class project, we felt the exercise could be useful for our capstone project for the purpose of generating an initial set of ideas that could possibly translate into a final solution.
All five of us started working on the stakeholder map. We eventually split to cover more ground. Neha and I (Advita) continued to analyze the insights and question the stakeholder map to frame more questions for our sponsors. Maggie, Peng and Rose took on the task of reversing our assumptions.
Stakeholder Map
The stakeholder map was useful as it created a common understanding amongst our team. It really brought up some important questions about the value brought in by different entities. Most importantly, it iterated the importance of our work for the organization.
Reversing Assumptions
Maggie, Peng and Rose made a large table with three headers: Assumptions, Reverse, Potential Solutions. There were many assumptions we had made based on our kick-off and stakeholder map which they worked on reversing. While some ideas were very creative (and probably not viable), there were a few plausible ones which added more questions to the long list we already had.
Surprise Trip to NYC
The more we looked at the results of our research, the more questions arose. The need for a research trip gradually increased during the week. Our sponsors reached out to us saying key stakeholders would be traveling during the time the initial research trip was slotted, requesting us to come either a week before or after. After discussing our schedules and what needed to be done, we felt it was best for us to split: Maggie, Neha and I to NYC while Peng and Rose held fort at CMU, continuing our interviews.
Up Next
Our trip to the HQ and expert interviews!
