Week 10: Beginning Evaluative Research

Carnegie Mellon University
Graduate Interaction Design Studio 2
Spring 2018

Kicking Off Evaluative Research

After spring break, we came back feeling refreshed and were ready for the next phase! As we re-group to figure out the approach for generating the concepts, we thought that it would be helpful to re-visit our insights and design principles from the generative and exploratory research. We also decided to develop concepts individually so we would have more diverse ideas to expand further later on.

Our strategies in developing concepts:

1. Check to see if the concepts are aligned with the design principles and insights from previous research.
2. Keep in mind who, when, where and how we are designing for when developing specific scenarios across different audiences/contexts.
3. Think of one problem to solve at the time instead of developing one complex idea that fulfills all the needs/goals.

Concept Ideation Phase 1 (part I)

We came back with more developed concepts and presented to the rest of the group. Then, we highlighted features of each concepts and grouped them into different buckets to see if similar concepts could merge to one big idea. After talking to Peter and Meric , we had better ideas on how are we going to revise our concepts and strategize for the speed dating sessions. Joe and Denise also created concept’s template so we could have consistent style and compile them in a presentation deck.

Notes from the feedback:

• Concept’s style and formate need to be consistent and aligned
• A/B testing speed dating method might be a great way to receive constructive feedbacks on two similar concepts
• Group speed dating might be more effective than gorilla testing for our situation since we need to get feedback for 17 concepts.
• Give each concepts special names, so users are easy to follow and provide feedback.
• We also could conduct two speed dating sessions for evaluating concepts

Questions to keep in mind when revising concepts:

1. How are we operating? What are the timeline for the concepts? (now, near future or 10 years?)

2. What tools will people engage with at that moment/range of time?

3. What will higher Ed/industry be like at that point of time? Will people behavior change in that future?

Concept Ideation Phase 1 (part II)

We did second round of revision so that our styles and formate were more aligned, then we went though them one by one to see if these are ready for speed dating session. We gave unique names to each concepts and we were able to compare and contrast some of the similar concepts at once.(we successfully merge another ideas together, so we now have 16 concepts in total!) We also found that storytelling descriptions are more engaging and easy to understand. Therefore, we still got small tweaks to work on as we moving forward. After looking at the concepts, we tried to position our ideas onto student/young professionals/manager timeline and see where they could fit into the concept of life-long learning.

Next Step

• We are going to do the final revision on our concepts for the speed dating session
• Discuss and plan the speed dating session (we are going to conduct the fist round of session this coming week)
• Discuss and explore other evaluative research methods to iterating our concepts