Team Reflection of the Research Phase
Looking back on our work, we developed a great dynamic in our working session, adopted great documentation and recording methods to track our thoughts and work. The design pieces and our organization strategies are super helpful when it comes to presentation preparation and report generation. Because we are trying to provide solutions in the field of documentation, we also need to form a good documentation and organization habit which can help us reflect back on previous study and work and also guides us to do better next time. Since we have documented our work process, we can support our decisions in this narrow-down process with actual data from our research.
For this Discovery/Research Phase, we learned a lot about conducting a comprehensive user research. Looking back at the whole process starting with reading materials such as PBL and MakerEd, to writing the interview protocol, and then conducting interviews and doing the synthesis, we have a clear understanding about how the whole process should be and how we can converge our findings into one vision statement.
In addition, we did lots of user study and research before presentation and showcase. However, we did not entirely realize the relationship among all of user studies and how these information and results can better guide us for future design and development until we began preparing “Design Phase” showcase and presentation. Because of the showcase, we are able to go deeper into the meaning of our documenting pieces and synthesis artifacts we created previously. We realized that we need to first understand our stakeholders’ work style and value in order to design a suitable solution for them, Our solution must be built based on appreciation to this kind of value, or it will not be helpful to the targeted users at all.
Importantly, we recognized the meaning and value of reflections and also noticed that insights are not just findings and problem discovering. Insights are something that can guide us and tell us what we should do next and why we want to solve the found problems. Not like findings which are mainly about why we want to conduct the research and what study we did, insights are about reasons behind the problems and our desired future. Although I have to be honest that reflection is stressful and difficult, reflections are powerful and mindful.
Double Diamond is a process model inspired by the professional design process that entails emphasis on problem analysis as the basis for creating a solution for an external client. The model is particularly suitable for structuring a course with external collaboration and user involvement in the development of solutions.
Thinking our approach under the Double Diamond structure, we have already done the first diamond! For the diverging, we conducted in-depth interviews with two stakeholders, co-designed our diagnostic map with our main stakeholder, explored quantitative and qualitative data, conducted literature review, etc. After that, we came into the converging stage.
As shown in the previous pages, we used Affinity Diagrams, Diagnostic Maps, and User Profile Boards to help us do the synthesis. For the next step, we are going to diverge again for ideation.
