Week 15: Moving toward final presentation I

Carnegie Mellon University
Graduate Interaction Design Studio 2
Spring 2018

Research methods presentation

As we were moving toward the final presentation week, we had planned our schedule out to help us stick with our plan and start to produce final deliverables. We also had to present our research methods final in the same week, so we spent a decent amount of time working on the presentation. We layout out the outline by four design phased: Territory Definition, Exploratory, Generative and Evaluative stages. Our objective for this presentation was to reflect on memorable methods that we used in each phase and talked what was working/not working. Therefore, we designed our slides by listing out different approaches we had tried within particular phases and giving thumbs up/thumbs down to the methods that were working/not working on our project. The presentation went pretty well, and we completed our first class of the semester. (woohoo!!)

Planning for final presentation

After the research methods presentation, we were fully focused on creating the assets and final deliverables for the project. The most important thing we needed to tackle on was how we are going to define the problem space and tell our story. We also listed out the main assets that we had to create for the presentation.

Final Assets:

1. Presentation deck: Denise would start to create a framework for the deck.
2. Video: Everyone would be working on producing video once we have all the design assets we need.
3. Wireframe: Joe would start to put together a user flow and everyone would be working on creating wireframes from low-fi to medium-fi.
4. Visual style: I would be working on put together a visual guidance to keep our design consistent.
5. Final testing with mentor/mentee: We would conduct our last usability testing with mentor/mentee to do our last design iteration.
6. Edges case/Fail state: We would also put edges case into our design consideration to create more transparency between users and AI.

Wireframe Ideation Part I

We took a stab on re-framing our storyboard so that we had a more refined design concepts for each key moments. We also dived into how we could leverage AI for each moments and when learning would happen in each scenarios. As we moving toward building wireframes, we talked about overall user flow and information architecture for both our mobile and desktop versions. We also started to take look at detail user flow and put together the oveararchiching information architecture for us to design wireframes.

User flow ideation

We moved from our scoreboard to simple user flow so that we knew the specific criteria, information and feature that we wanted to add to each screens. This also helped us to rethink about main interactions between mentors, mentees and AI. Then, we divided the wireframes and everyone took on several key moment to work on.

We came back with more refined and detailed wireframes, and each person presented their design to get feedback from others. Joe started to put our existing screens together into the user flow. From here, we could know if everything makes sense and which screens or interactions are missing.

Visual Guidance

Since we got five people working on the wireframes, I created a wireframe visual guidance so everyone could get on the same page and our design would be consistent. We only had grey scale visual style at this moment but we will design high-fi visual guidance in the next few days.

Mentor interview insights

While we working on the final deliverables, we also interview few mentors to understand their mental models and motivations. There were several insights that we got from our survey.

1. The motivation on being a mentor is that it’s not only the opportunity to provide advices to the people with similar experience but also the opportunity to learn from each other.
2. Mentors aren’t looking for money incentives. Mentors usually get gratification and recognition. Some mentors use it for professional benefit as well.
3. Usually mentors get assigned with a person that has similar experience. It’s a mutually respectful relationship which both side need to get along well and know the skills/qualities to develop from each other.
4. Pain-points in mentorship: time commitment, good mentors usually are busy and most of mentees don’t really know what they wanted to accomplish.

Wireframe ideation Part II

After we flashing out more wireframes, we put them side by side to double check on the visual consistency. We still need to fix some visual mis-alignments, but the overall wireframe looked amazing and we planned on moving forward to high-fi in the next few days.

Next Steps

We divided our work flow into Wireframes/Visuals, Video and Presentation and two people will take one of the categories to work on. Denise also created a final timeline so that we could stick with the plan and finish our final deliverables on schedule. There were few things that we would be tackle on this coming week:

1. Finalized scripts and storyboard for video shooting on Wednesday
2. Put together contents in presentation deck
3. Wrapping up wireframes and moving to high-fi screens this week
4. Usability testing with mentors/mentees