We have a design direction!
Time to get moving! We’ve got four two-week sprints, and have a lot of ground to cover.
After much deliberation, we decided that we would work on technician feedback. Our hypothesis here combined the finding that techs are highly valuable sources of feedback with the breakdowns that techs aren’t always consulted during the authoring process, and not all techs give feedback during after they’ve executed a work authorization document.
Combined with the concept of (avoiding) data bloat, we planned to create interfaces and interactions that will institutionalize and support the feedback from technicians. This could be given to other technicians, engineers, and other stakeholders. This could enable people who actually do the work to effectively communicate with the people who write how it should be done. Using this approach we hope to achieve one of our side goals, empowering technicians.
We worked through two narrowing sessions this week. One that allowed us to settle on our main area of interest, “Technician Feedback,” and a second that allowed us to determine the focus of our first (albeit shortened) sprint: “Feedback Triggers.”
Armed with some research directions, including review of official Work Authorization documents, design reviews, and some precedent review about feedback, we planned to begin prototyping. The group voted to be a little bit more freeform this week, allowing ourselves the creative freedom to create any kind of user-testable interface or device that explores the realm of feedback triggers.
Getting specific to answer questions
Mid-week, we met with our faculty advisors and our clients, to fill them in on the direction we decided and how we planned to tackle it. Both our advisors and clients asked good, thorough questions about how this direction would help accomplish NASA’s WAD goals and how we would execute our vision. While we were able to answer some questions on the spot, some questions exposed that we need to be validating our most uncertain assumptions first and that there is an opportunity to make a stronger case for “technician feedback”. This can come from specificity in our approach. What feedback should be collected? How/who/when does it help?
A precedent research small team compiled information about effective feedback and responses and products that facilitate feedback. A particularly interesting find was a “real-time” feedback platform for websites called Qualaroo which utilizes context awareness, asking questions at the right time in the customer journey, and offering relevant suggestions.
To get specific scenarios to research or include in a design, we dug into the few paper WADs were given last semester and bodystormed them. This enabled us to also track collaboration between participants in a WAD and the relationship between different steps in the WAD. We used some from our WADs, insights from out technician interview in March, NASA’s WAD goals, and the precedent research in order to produce some paper prototypes (which are still being worked on at the time of this writing) to speed date with next week.
