Journey with the “Numbers”
So what exactly IS our solution doing?
We’ve been in California for about a month now! Wait…California? Yes, we moved here about a month ago to continue working on our project with NASA. (I still don’t have a NASA badge 😭)
Creating Journeys
From our previous post, we had a variety prototypes/features that we speed-dated and also internally tested. These exercises helped us build out a persona for which we crafted a user story also known as a user journey.
This user journey captures the communication between level 3 discipline engineers to ensure that updates made by either party, can be easily received, processed and debated by the other party.
In addition to the user journey, we created a basic screen map that encapsulated various features from the user journey into specific screens.
Realization — Finally, a specific enough focus
While the above process took place, we had a call with one of our stakeholders and realized very critical information that would catapult us into an extremely narrowed focus. This information can quite literally be stated as:
It’s all about the Numbers….
Different teams basically have different interpretations around how numbers are used in various requirements. Additionally, numbers situated in various tables don’t have any context of usage around them. These implicit interpretations discovered later, cause a lot of the work to be redone.
Creating Journeys with Numbers in Mind
We revisited our user journey and updated it with interpretations of numbers as a main part of the flow. Based on this, we also redid our screen map and started working on low-fidelity prototypes.
Low-Fi Prototyping
Our Low-fi prototypes were basically paper prototypes with a bunch of versions. This allowed us to test concepts and their layouts.
We conducted the low-fi prototype testing (5 Second Tests, Think Alouds, Semi-Structured Interviews) with designers at NASA Ames Research Center to get their thoughts and feelings about our work.
Mid-Fi Prototyping
The low-fi prototype testing results gave us some insights into which versions seem to paint the situation. We selected these versions and started building mid-fi prototypes to test at Marshall Space Flight Center the following week.
At this stage, we have our Mid-Fi prototypes fleshed out and a solid test plan ready with it. We’re excited to embark on our “Journey with the Numbers” to Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Alabama to test out our solution with actual users! Will our solution fix their issues with interpreting numbers, or will it just cause more confusion? Find out more on our next post!
We are 5 MHCI students at Carnegie Mellon University, currently working on our capstone project, where we work with NASA to help engineers understand being “done” in building the Space Launch System (SLS). We will be taking turns to write about our research activities and insights, design decisions and how we navigate through ambiguity in general.
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