Spring -Breaks-

Spring breaks! But not Spring Break — we did that already. Winter is reluctantly loosening its grip on Pittsburgh and the snows are turning to rain. MHCI, however, is not yet loosening its grip on us.

We kicked it into high gear this week, with a strong focus on deliverables and two teams split between primary research and analogous domains.

Here’s a shortlist of some of our work:

• WAD lifecycle
• Graph of emotion vs WAD lifecycle & role
• Standard protocol vs actual behavior
• Competitive matrix & supporting docs
• Research flows for academics, paralegals, and programmers
• Case study of stackOverflow
• Stakeholder analysis
• In-depth Process flow
• Real estate graph
• Design charette

Despite the many hours we’ve spent rolling around in our primary research data, we’ve missed some opportunities to pull out nice, clean insights. We reversed that trend this week with some new diagrams that show emotional response to WAD deviations, based on the user role and life cycle of a WAD. As it turns out, people earlier in the lifecycle of a WAD are more concerned with avoiding deviations, while those that execute a WAD may have a more accepting attitude, feeling that deviations are an indelible aspect of life at NASA.

Those who have the authority tend to be the ones most annoyed with the alteration process.

We dove into analogous research this week also, focusing on how people do research in different domains. The primary purpose of this was to compare different research processes to the ones TOSC engineers at Kennedy follow when they create new WADs. Basically we emphasized a shortcoming where much of the quality depends on the optional process of referring to a qualified technician.

An oversimplified representation of the WAD research process

We focused on Paralegals, Academics, and Developers. The tools took emphasis. Newer, free tools like StackOverflow make use of the collective knowledge of the masses to crowdsource and moderate question and answer environments, while higher risk environments like court case research make use of tools that employ their own curators of information in a more authoritative way.

A comparatively simple flow that Academics follow when choosing to cite sources

StackOverflow provided an opportunity to look more deeply into a particular product, and we tried an experimental study to analyze their user interface. After revealing user needs through interviews and user flow mapping, the user needs’ were mapped across the interface itself, blocked off the screen area that they occupied. The underlying image of the site was then removed and the areas themselves were clustered, reshaped, and compared.

How do certain features take up screen real estate?

Getting playful with how to represent screen space. Some of us miss New York

critiquing early documents amongst the team

Finding out that “assessing question relevance” was important wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, since that need covers the main body of the question and answer, the things people are looking for. However, it was interesting to find that so much screen real estate was dedicated to finding new questions, especially in the area of the answer itself. This suggests that moving between questions to find the right one may be extremely valuable.

This week we’re on to the good stuff: visioning. We’ll be working through generative exercises to flesh out concepts and solutions, often in fun and quirky ways. We’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Until next time!

Team C-137