Week 16: Preparing for Our Reflection and Communication Presentation
Carnegie Mellon University
Graduate Interaction Design Studio 2
Spring 2018
Like Melody mentioned in her final post, our team laid out our remaining work into three different buckets.
- Wireframes/Prototyping
- Concept Video
- Final Presentation Deck
At this point of time, we understood that we could no longer be spending time on the same thing and in order for our concept to reach the desired level of fidelity, we would need to divide and conquer the remaining work.
Wireframes/Prototyping
We spent the first part of the week taking a stab at every necessary screen, this gave us the ability to see where we would need to make additional screens. We were also able to determine the specific screens we would need to spend more time on for the final presentation.
One thing, we found helpful was the creation of the above blueprint. This diagram made it easier for us to see where time needed to spent and where time did not need to be spent. This chart also allowed us to move from various levels of fidelity and keep track of where screens had reached the right level of fidelity and where they had yet to.
Our medium fidelity wireframes also helped us usability test our platform. We created prompts to take a user through the process of using our app. One such prompt was:
You received a message from your mentor Brooklyn, checking in on how you are doing.
You remind her that you have a big interview with Neuralink coming up next week and you have a question about how to prepare.
Your mentor doesn’t respond right away and a virtual agent steps in to help provide an answer to your question.
After confirming that the agents assumptions are correct, the virtual agent provides a final answer.
We then asked our subjects questions like:
What would you do to learn more about the information provided in the answer?
and
Would you prefer to highlight conversation in the chat?
These questions brought up a number of insights that were then rolled into our higher fidelity wireframes.
Milestone is weird in the reflection section
Put more emphasis on the long term relationship…not limited to finding this
In conjunction with building out our wireframes, our team created a library of symbols that made up our visual system. We then used these symbols throughout the creation of our higher fidelity wireframes.
With the symbols, we were able to create higher fidelity wireframes that we then used for our presentation and video. We were also able to use the wireframes to create flows similar to what you see below. This allowed us to better map out the flow a user would go through when using our platform.
In addition to building out these wireframes, we created a number of prototypes showing the types of micro-interactions and animations you would expect to see within the Seam platform.
Concept Video
Over the week, our concept video took multiple forms. We first took an initial stab at a storyboard and a script.
We decided to take another look at the script and created the following storyboard, which inspired our final concept video. This concept played up the mentor, mentee, and phone as completely separate elements. Instead of just overlaying the phone, each had their own frame.
We eventually finalized our script based off of this script. You can find the finalized script below.
Finalized Script
Meet Taylor. Taylor is a senior mechanical engineering major.
She is preparing for her first professional job, but feels anxious. She doesn’t know what to expect.
She has the technical skills to succeed, but she knows that won’t be enough as roles in the workplace evolve due to automation. A focus on her communication and other soft skills, will set her apart from her peers.
That’s why we created Seam. An intelligent mentoring platform, connecting students with mentors to help bridge the gap between higher education and industry.
When Taylor signs up for Seam, she is asked about her experiences, location, and communication preferences.
Seam matches her with three mentors based on her answers. One of these three mentors is Brooklyn, an engineering manager at GE.
Taylor thinks Brooklyn may be the perfect mentor for her based on the information Seam provides and decides to ask her a couple questions about her journey to becoming a manager.
Brooklyn shares what she looks for in a new hire, while Seam provides helpful links and suggests that Taylor and Brooklyn have a longer meeting to discuss potential career paths.
They end up having a great conversation. Taylor learns more about the necessary steps to achieve her goals and how to effectively communicate as an engineer, while they both continue to learn more about each other.
After leaving the chat, Taylor is prompted to reflect and check out the meeting notes. She then decides if she wants to share the notes with the Seam community, and tracks her progress towards achieving her goals.
These interactions make up a repository of knowledge, Seam uses to empower impactful human to human relationships. Relationships that help Taylor and other students get their first job, navigate their career, grow their communication and soft skills, and secure long-term friends and mentors.
Shot Direction
With the script and storyboard in hand, we created an Excel document that was used when shooting the video. This way we knew exactly what we needed to shoot and where we needed to shoot that shot.
Presentation Deck
Early in the week, we also made an outline of final presentation deck.
We settled on a format, which was a little different from what we had initially planned. Our final planned flow was:
- Context (A little bit of information on the context of our project. What we were looking at from the start of the semester?)
- Research (A brief overview of our research and the insights and principles that came out of it)
- Video (Go into the story of Taylor and Brooklyn, the two personas we created earlier into our semester.)
- Interactions (Go into the details of our platform? What do each of the features afford a user?)
- Impact (What impact do we hope the Seam platform has on our users?)
- Future (What aspects of the platform, would we look to improve in the future?)
- Questions (Open up the floor to any questions, the audience might have)
We also worked out the arc that we hoped to run through in our final presentation. This included revisiting the problem, solution, how we are addressing the brief, and the impact of our solution.
We used this information as a guide for the information we eventually decided to include in the final presentation.
We also went into the specific interactions we wanted to show in more depth in the presentation. These interactions would be first introduced in the concept video, but would be further explained in the slides.
We also took some time to figure out where in the presentation to play our concept video. We did not want to play the concept video first and then go through research or have someone watch the video without any context for our project. At the same time, we did not want to go through all the functionality and then play the video. To deal with this, we ended up putting the video between our research and our deep dive into the platform functionality.
Conversations with Mentors
During the week, we also set out to speak with mentors to better understand their motivations. Through these conversations, we were able to receive feedback that further supported our platform.
One question we did not have answers to before this week was, what incentives do mentors have to mentor? We found that these individuals were intrinsically motivated, they found mentorship to be rewarding and as a two sided relationship where both parties learned from each other.
We learned that the most effective mentor-mentee relationships were those with strong connections. Relationships where both the mentor and mentee saw themselves in the other individual.
We saw that time was a huge pain point in these relationships. Both individuals, especially mentors have busy schedules, so it is necessary for these meetings to be very productive in a short period of time. This is potentially a problem when mentees are unsure what they want out of a conversation or the relationship.
We plan to use this information to support our concept in our final presentation.
