Week 11: Continuing our Evaluative Research

Carnegie Mellon University
Graduate Interaction Design Studio 2
Spring 2018

This week, we continued our evaluative research and our commitment to the strategies below:

1. Ensuring that our concepts are aligned with the design principles and insights previously established.
2. Considering who, what, when, where, and why as we continue to develop our scenarios, synthesize our findings from our evaluative research, and make decisions on our direction moving forward.
3. Ensuring that our scenarios are kept separate from each other. As our research progresses, we hope to explore ways we could combine concepts to better address our design principles.

Finalizing Our Storyboards

We spent half of Monday’s class making the changes to our storyboards that Melody mentioned in the last post.

Now that we have all the storyboards finalized, we plan to each run speed dating sessions this week. Over the week we plan synthesize our findings that we gathered through our speed dating sessions.

Speed Dating Sessions

To run our speed dating sessions, we created a Keynote presentation and a Google Form survey.

We put all our scenarios in a slide format that we established as a team. The slides were put together as Keynote presentation. This will make it easy it easy for us to present this portion of the project in three weeks.

The survey will also help in that all the information we acquire from our speed dating will be in one place.

Organizing Activities

On Wednesday we went through an activity measuring how well each of our scenarios address the research we had already completed. To do this, we gave each scenario a score from 1 to 6 based on how well it addresses the following criteria:

• Does it improve communication skills?
• How well does the scenario leverage artificial intelligence?
• Does the scenario facilitate human to human connections?
• Is the scenario aligned with our research and established design principles?

This activity ended up looking like what you can see below.

These images show how some of the scenarios are more and less aligned with our research and facilitate more or less human interaction. For instance, our virtual mentor facilitates no human to human interaction, while our virtual meetings does facilitate human to human interaction.

Synthesizing Our Findings

We took some time on Sunday to synthesize our findings from our speed dating. To do this we took all our scenarios, put our synthesized findings from the speed datings on post it notes, made note of how many individuals liked and didn’t like the concepts, and made note of the scores given to each concept in our earlier organizing activities.

We then started cutting the concepts that either were not well received in our speed dating or ones we were not comfortable with. We made sure to not completely forget the concepts we cut and made a list of the qualities from those ideas that we wanted to carry with us regardless of the direction we decide to go.

We ended up settling on three concepts that we plan to explore over the next week.

Concept 1: Combination of Mentor Match, Your Perfect Virtual Mentor and Crowd-lingo

Concept 2: Combination of Presentation AR, Communication Evaluation, and Smart Presenter

Concept 3: Combination of Collab AI, College Hire Onboarding, and Predictive Assistant

Next Steps

Over the next week plan to:

1. Create revised higher fidelity storyboards based on our three concepts to run through and receive feedback from experts.
2. Schedule times to talk to experts to discuss our three concepts.
3. Build higher fidelity assets that allows our team to test our concepts in a more experiential way.
4. Settle on one concept that we will take forward for the rest of the semester.