As mentioned before, one of the outcomes of the JISC Academic Networking project is that the results of the project will be integrated in future releases of the open source Collaboration and Learning Environment Sakai.
For those who haven't heard about Sakai before: Sakai is a Collaboration and Learning Environment platform for making teaching, learning and academic collaboration easier by meeting the needs of today's learners, instructors and researchers.
Soon, Sakai 3 will be launched, which will be a much more interactive web 2.0 version, and on top of that enabling the nicest facets of Social Networking.
Many of the ideas which will appear in Sakai3 are in a way based on the User Research from the Academic Networking Project, as well as definitely having been a great inspiration in making decisions whilst creating Sakai3.
We do intend to integrate more of the outcomes of the project in later versions of Sakai3 as well.
Interested in watching the Sakai3 code repositories?
Then don't hesitate to have a look around in the Kernel code repository or the UX code repository .
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Monday, 8 March 2010
Assembly on personas and user testing
On Friday 5th of March we hosted an Assembly on how to create personas and how to do user testing.
During our project we learned a lot about these topics so we thought it would definitely be useful sharing it with other projects in this way.
The assembly was in fact a hands-on workshop with first a case study on how we went about creating personas and doing user testing, then some general theory with hints and tips if you want to do it yourself, and afterwards the participants got the possibility to try creating personas and doing user testing themselves.
Unfortunately, some people who wanted to come along couldn’t attend after all. We might organise another workshop in the future, as the people who could attend it, seemed to find it interesting.
An example - use case
Showing how to do user testing
Participants looking at information to start creating their own personas
Participants preparing for a user testing session, looking at wire frames
Trying out a behavioural axes exercise
Materials used during workshop
The documents below are those we used during the workshop. Feel free to have a look at them!
Couldn't attend the workshop while you desperately wanted to find out how to create personas or do user testing? No worries - these materials should give you a start on trying it out yourself.
> PowerPoint used during workshop
Persona materials
> Persona template – what information should go in your persona for sure?
> Examples of personas 1 – these are the personas we created during our project, here used as inspiration during the workshop
> Description of fictive users – you could use this set of ‘fictive users’ as set of data when creating personas yourself as an exercise
> Pictures which you can use when creating personas
User testing materials
> General list of tips when creating a set of questions for your user testing session
> Short example of a user testing session
> Example of a list of questions 1 – we used this during our first user testing session. You can use this set of questions as example when creating a list yourself.
> Example of a list of questions 2 – we used this during our second user testing session. You can use this set of questions as example when creating a list yourself.
> Paper prototypes and wire frames you could use when trying out user testing: Paper prototype green concept, paper prototype blue concept, paper prototype red concept, wire frames
During our project we learned a lot about these topics so we thought it would definitely be useful sharing it with other projects in this way.
The assembly was in fact a hands-on workshop with first a case study on how we went about creating personas and doing user testing, then some general theory with hints and tips if you want to do it yourself, and afterwards the participants got the possibility to try creating personas and doing user testing themselves.
Unfortunately, some people who wanted to come along couldn’t attend after all. We might organise another workshop in the future, as the people who could attend it, seemed to find it interesting.
An example - use case
Showing how to do user testing
Participants looking at information to start creating their own personas
Participants preparing for a user testing session, looking at wire frames
Trying out a behavioural axes exercise
Materials used during workshop
The documents below are those we used during the workshop. Feel free to have a look at them!
Couldn't attend the workshop while you desperately wanted to find out how to create personas or do user testing? No worries - these materials should give you a start on trying it out yourself.
> PowerPoint used during workshop
Persona materials
> Persona template – what information should go in your persona for sure?
> Examples of personas 1 – these are the personas we created during our project, here used as inspiration during the workshop
> Description of fictive users – you could use this set of ‘fictive users’ as set of data when creating personas yourself as an exercise
> Pictures which you can use when creating personas
User testing materials
> General list of tips when creating a set of questions for your user testing session
> Short example of a user testing session
> Example of a list of questions 1 – we used this during our first user testing session. You can use this set of questions as example when creating a list yourself.
> Example of a list of questions 2 – we used this during our second user testing session. You can use this set of questions as example when creating a list yourself.
> Paper prototypes and wire frames you could use when trying out user testing: Paper prototype green concept, paper prototype blue concept, paper prototype red concept, wire frames
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
the JISC Institutional Innovation Exchange at Birmingham
On Thursday 28th and Friday 29th of January, Laura and Anne-Sophie went off to Birmingham for the JISC Institutional Innovation Exchange meeting.
One of the activities was the Trade Fair... With 7 sold products, we didn't do such a bad job! Thanks for all who bought our products. For those who would still like to have a look at them, you can find all the information you need below.
Overall, it was good to see all projects and people again, and to find out what progress they made.
One of the activities was the Trade Fair... With 7 sold products, we didn't do such a bad job! Thanks for all who bought our products. For those who would still like to have a look at them, you can find all the information you need below.
Overall, it was good to see all projects and people again, and to find out what progress they made.
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
Product 1 – Find out how to use user-centric design!
Desperate to understand what your faculty and students REALLY want (because it’s never what they ask for)?
This handbook gives you the methodology description of the JISC Academic Networking project.
A run-through, with real examples, pictures and lots of ‘how-do-I-start-on-this’ should enable you to get started on a project, using this methodology yourself.
> Download the Handbook
> Download the complete method book - This is a very long and detailed version of the Handbook above, so be warned! If you do want to get the details though, with a lot of examples and pictures, you might find this one interesting
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
This handbook gives you the methodology description of the JISC Academic Networking project.
A run-through, with real examples, pictures and lots of ‘how-do-I-start-on-this’ should enable you to get started on a project, using this methodology yourself.
> Download the Handbook
> Download the complete method book - This is a very long and detailed version of the Handbook above, so be warned! If you do want to get the details though, with a lot of examples and pictures, you might find this one interesting
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
Product 2 – Find out how to involve stakeholders efficiently!
Looking to try something new with your next project, or you simply want to find out how to involve your stakeholders efficiently? Then this product is something for you!
It can sometimes be really hard to get your stakeholders involved. This tick-box-shaped document isn’t a walkthrough roadmap, but a list of initiatives you can choose from, in order to involve your stakeholders in an efficient way.
> Document on how to involve stakeholders efficiently
> Document about personas - Adds to the information in the previous document
> Find out more information on 'Stakeholder buy-in' on the BRII blog
> The Academic Networking presentation about 'Stakeholder buy-in' at the BRII assembly in Oxford
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
It can sometimes be really hard to get your stakeholders involved. This tick-box-shaped document isn’t a walkthrough roadmap, but a list of initiatives you can choose from, in order to involve your stakeholders in an efficient way.
> Document on how to involve stakeholders efficiently
> Document about personas - Adds to the information in the previous document
> Find out more information on 'Stakeholder buy-in' on the BRII blog
> The Academic Networking presentation about 'Stakeholder buy-in' at the BRII assembly in Oxford
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
Product 3 – Find out how to do user testing!
Another outcome of this exciting project is a brief example video which shows you a real user testing session so you get an idea of what user testing is like.
We also run a workshop on Friday 5th of March 2010 which gives you concrete tips on how to get started on doing a user testing session yourself, and a chance to ask questions and explore your ideas with others who’ve done it before!
After the workshop, you’ll be invited to see the sights of Cambridge!
This workshop will take place at CARET (16 Mill Lane, CB2 1SB Cambridge). It will probably be a full day (morning and afternoon), but further details will follow later.
Apply for attending this workshop by emailing Laura (laura @ caret.cam.ac.uk) or Anne-Sophie (asd38 @ caret.cam.ac.uk), and definitely have a look at the video!
> Watch the video
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
We also run a workshop on Friday 5th of March 2010 which gives you concrete tips on how to get started on doing a user testing session yourself, and a chance to ask questions and explore your ideas with others who’ve done it before!
After the workshop, you’ll be invited to see the sights of Cambridge!
This workshop will take place at CARET (16 Mill Lane, CB2 1SB Cambridge). It will probably be a full day (morning and afternoon), but further details will follow later.
Apply for attending this workshop by emailing Laura (laura @ caret.cam.ac.uk) or Anne-Sophie (asd38 @ caret.cam.ac.uk), and definitely have a look at the video!
> Watch the video
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
Product 4 – Academic Networking in your Virtual Learning Environment!
One of the outcomes of the JISC Academic Networking project is that the results of the project will be integrated in future releases of open source Online Learning Environment Sakai.
Keep an eye on SakaiProject.org!
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
Keep an eye on SakaiProject.org!
> Download the flyer
This outcome is one of the products presented at the JISC Innovation Exchange at Birmingham 28th-29th January
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Off to the programme meeting...
Next week, Laura and Anne-Sophie will be off to Aston for the Institutional Innovation JISC programme meeting.
We're looking forward to meeting the other projects, and figuring out what to buy in the Trade Fair... watch this space for posts about what we'll have available in the Fair!
We're looking forward to meeting the other projects, and figuring out what to buy in the Trade Fair... watch this space for posts about what we'll have available in the Fair!
Monday, 16 November 2009
Assembling
We are starting to think in depth about our Assembly, for the JISC Institutional Innovation programme. We'd like to have a topic of "Personas and User Testing" as we think user testing would be of interest to others at this project phase.
Tentative dates might be 8th, 14th or 15th December, for an assembly roughly 11am-4pm at Cambridge. The programme will include:
Thanks!
Tentative dates might be 8th, 14th or 15th December, for an assembly roughly 11am-4pm at Cambridge. The programme will include:
- Personas and their place in user research and testing (presentation by Cambridge)
- 10 minute micro-briefing "Post-It Notes and their Special Place in research"
- Our experiences of user testing as part of a user-centric design process (presentation by Cambridge)
- Best practices in user testing (group brainstorming, to be documented online for comment)
- Hopefully some presentations from others about their user testing experiences :)
Thanks!
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Even more documenting!
As promised here is the 100-pages document which has finally been finished (in fact, it's a bit longer than 100 pages).
We even made a 20-page version of it in case you don’t want to go that much into detail.
These documents should give you a detailed overview of our project, telling you all how we went about doing things like research and design.
Our colleague Clay Fenlason of Georgia Tech even asked for this 20-page document to use as a use case example during his teaching.
We even made a 20-page version of it in case you don’t want to go that much into detail.
These documents should give you a detailed overview of our project, telling you all how we went about doing things like research and design.
Our colleague Clay Fenlason of Georgia Tech even asked for this 20-page document to use as a use case example during his teaching.
Friday, 24 July 2009
As Laura James said, the project was presented at the Sakai Conference in Boston. Preparing a 45 minute presentation is surprisingly harder as it seems. I was glad we had so much time to present it, but even 45 minutes still didn't seem to be enough to present everything...There's just too much to say about this interesting project!
When doing the presentation, people seemed to react really enthusiastic about it. Some people were familiar with bits from the used methodology like personas or scenarios, but were surprised by the colourful walls covered in post-its notes and the fact lots of methods were now used all together. Some people seemed to recognize themselves in the personas! Cool! Others made some interesting comments, like: "At this moment, those 3 personas seem to be the right set of presentation for those people, but people behaviours change, so it might be possible that there are new behaviours and also new personas coming up within X years. How would we adapt the system to those differences?" Definitely worth thinking about I would say!
Interested having a look at the slides we used during the presentation?
> Sakai PowerPoint presentation
Some people were so interested in our personas (or simply in the methodology of creating personas), so we promised to share them.
Are you also desperately longing to have a look at our personas or scenarios? Then don't hesitate to have a look!
> Personas, scenarios and the methodology of creating a persona
When doing the presentation, people seemed to react really enthusiastic about it. Some people were familiar with bits from the used methodology like personas or scenarios, but were surprised by the colourful walls covered in post-its notes and the fact lots of methods were now used all together. Some people seemed to recognize themselves in the personas! Cool! Others made some interesting comments, like: "At this moment, those 3 personas seem to be the right set of presentation for those people, but people behaviours change, so it might be possible that there are new behaviours and also new personas coming up within X years. How would we adapt the system to those differences?" Definitely worth thinking about I would say!
Interested having a look at the slides we used during the presentation?
> Sakai PowerPoint presentation
Some people were so interested in our personas (or simply in the methodology of creating personas), so we promised to share them.
Are you also desperately longing to have a look at our personas or scenarios? Then don't hesitate to have a look!
> Personas, scenarios and the methodology of creating a persona
Documenting, documenting, documenting!
Everyone knows documenting can take a lot of your time. I've been busy for some time now and still I have the feeling we've not covered everything. Sure, these documents are mainly to make sure we're not forgetting anything because it's so easy to forget about something. This means they're actually still more drafts than final documents.
Beside some general writing ups, Tjhien, Oszkar and I thought about writing the whole methodology up within google.docs which didn't seemed to be ideal afterwards but is still helpful if you need to write things up in a collaborative way. We tried to cover all the details in this draft document and we ended up with...more than 100 pages! Really, you don't WANT to read this yet. It's still a draft.
We learned a lot though, even just by documenting. For example: It's really hard to explain certain methods through the medium 'text'. So we tried to start making simple videos of some methods we used.
They're not yet finished, but these are some examples to give you an idea:
How we did task-goal analysis (Research phase):
During the research phase, we wrote down the things participants mentioned during the interviews. We captured this in an unusual but extremely helpful way, being: writing down every entry on colour-coded post it notes. Like this it would be easier to sort this information afterwards. Just have a look how we did that.
> full version of the video with some more information and details
> video restricted to Task-goal analysis
How we did user testing (Design phase):
We made some designs of concepts and of course, we wanted to test them with real people to see how they would react on them. Are we still doing the right thing? Therefore, we used a double mirrored room with in one room the participant and a facilitator and in the other room the people who would observe and analyze the data. During the first iteration, participants were looking at paper prototypes of the designs (which you can see in this video) and in the second iteration, they looked at wire frames visible on a real screen.
Beside some general writing ups, Tjhien, Oszkar and I thought about writing the whole methodology up within google.docs which didn't seemed to be ideal afterwards but is still helpful if you need to write things up in a collaborative way. We tried to cover all the details in this draft document and we ended up with...more than 100 pages! Really, you don't WANT to read this yet. It's still a draft.
We learned a lot though, even just by documenting. For example: It's really hard to explain certain methods through the medium 'text'. So we tried to start making simple videos of some methods we used.
They're not yet finished, but these are some examples to give you an idea:
How we did task-goal analysis (Research phase):
During the research phase, we wrote down the things participants mentioned during the interviews. We captured this in an unusual but extremely helpful way, being: writing down every entry on colour-coded post it notes. Like this it would be easier to sort this information afterwards. Just have a look how we did that.
> full version of the video with some more information and details
> video restricted to Task-goal analysis
How we did user testing (Design phase):
We made some designs of concepts and of course, we wanted to test them with real people to see how they would react on them. Are we still doing the right thing? Therefore, we used a double mirrored room with in one room the participant and a facilitator and in the other room the people who would observe and analyze the data. During the first iteration, participants were looking at paper prototypes of the designs (which you can see in this video) and in the second iteration, they looked at wire frames visible on a real screen.
Friday, 26 June 2009
working with Sakai
We last posted when in the throes of our design phase, with iterations of prototyping and user testing - very intense. We managed one round of conceptual design, paper prototype testing with users, a design combination and refinement, wireframe testing with users, and then final refinement.
We are now very proud to have a set of wireframes for one overall design concept which we have created through a full user-centric design process!
Since then we've been working on capturing our work and recording the details of what we have done, how others might do similar things, what results we've found and what we learnt, for future dissemination. The incredible density of activity through our research and user-centric design processes has lead to a huge amount of information, and crystallising that into forms which are useful to ourselves and others has been time consuming - but worthwhile.
We are also looking ahead to the next phases of our project; potentially another round of design and testing, and then integration of the system into new Sakai. Work on the backend engine of new Sakai ("K2") progresses apace, and we're also building some basic networking features into our user interface for Sakai3 as the first hint of what academic networking might become. This does not yet include the full power and excitement of the concepts this project is generating...
Meanwhile, the JISC Academic Networking project will be presenting in two sessions at the forthcoming Sakai conference in Boston, July 8-10th 2009. Look out for John Norman and Anne-Sophie de Baets there!
We are now very proud to have a set of wireframes for one overall design concept which we have created through a full user-centric design process!
Since then we've been working on capturing our work and recording the details of what we have done, how others might do similar things, what results we've found and what we learnt, for future dissemination. The incredible density of activity through our research and user-centric design processes has lead to a huge amount of information, and crystallising that into forms which are useful to ourselves and others has been time consuming - but worthwhile.
We are also looking ahead to the next phases of our project; potentially another round of design and testing, and then integration of the system into new Sakai. Work on the backend engine of new Sakai ("K2") progresses apace, and we're also building some basic networking features into our user interface for Sakai3 as the first hint of what academic networking might become. This does not yet include the full power and excitement of the concepts this project is generating...
Meanwhile, the JISC Academic Networking project will be presenting in two sessions at the forthcoming Sakai conference in Boston, July 8-10th 2009. Look out for John Norman and Anne-Sophie de Baets there!
Sunday, 17 May 2009
And so the design phase came to an end
Lets again summarise what we’ve done during the last months…
Creating extreme designs using personas and requirements
We focused on the concepts and requirements which we thought would be most useful and used those to brainstorm and think of ‘extreme’ designs.
This means we were using these extreme ideas to turn them into metaphors which were much easier to use during the design.
E.g. The metaphore or extreme idea of ‘ballroom dancing’ explained the idea that people sometimes spend time together during a project (so dancing together for a while), after a while they split up and work with someone else (splitting up during a dance and start dancing with someone else in the ballroom).
Extreme ideas turned into metaphors and clustered in groups which seemed to have commonalities
User testing session 1 using paper prototypes
At the end of the research phase we ended up with 3 personas. For each of those personas we created a set of frames (representing the pages within a system) so we ended up with 3 main concepts.
These frames are paper prototypes. This makes sure people will give us more honest feedback (and won’t say things like ‘Hmm, I don’t like the colour of that button’ because they’ll see it’s drawn and not finished at all). We wouldn't be focusing on that kind of detailed feedback yet anyway.
We recruited a set of people again, representing all the different people within the university (subject, age, role, etc). Whilst showing them the paper prototypes during this user testing session, we also used a set of questions so we were sure we kept focus on the right things. The location was in a usability lab, having a one-way mirror where the observers took notes on the other side of the mirror. This feedback would than be used to refine the concept.
Green concept: focusing on Isobel who’s really sociable, and outgoing. Therefore the frames of this concept focus on the extreme idea of ‘events-going out’ as this is very important to Isobel.
Green concept paper prototypes
- homepage -
Blue concept: Focusing on Peter who sometimes feels a bit lost. He doesn’t always know what to do first because he’s not always talking to the right people either. Therefore the frames of this concept show the idea of the ‘boardgame’: representing a set of steps you need to fulfil in order to reach your goal.
E.g. In order to fulfil this course, you need to go to this talk, finish this paper etc.
Blue concept paper prototypes
- homepage-
Red concept: Focusing on Kate who’s senior and just wants to save time in any possible way. This set of frames shows the extreme idea of ‘the switchboard’ which makes is possible for Kate just to see the things she’s interested in, not overwhelming her with things which just waste her time.
Red concept paper prototypes
- homepage-
Refine concept using feedback from user testing session 1
We did some brainstorming and used all the feedback from user testing session 1 to merge all the screens and thoughts from the first set of screens into 1 set of screens, representing all the refinements and usable ideas.
Example of a page which got all the feedback merged together
Oszkar redesigning
User testing session 2 using clickable wireframes
This phase was very similar to the first user testing session, which means it was again in the same usability room, with an observer who noted down the feedback. The difference this time was that we used clickable wireframes instead of paper prototypes. This was 1 set of frames instead of 3 because these were merged together. Further, we used again a questionnaire which guided us through the set of tasks.
clickable wire frames
- homepage -
Refine concept using feedback from user testing session 2
We used the feedback to again refine the last version of the frames.
Documents
In the text above, you can find the documents we used during the design phase which might give you a better understanding of the information above.
In case you missed out on them, you can also find them below.
User testing session 1 using paper prototypes
> General information about the concepts - This gives a general description what's meant with each of the concepts
> Green concept - This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept - mainly focusing on Isobel
> Blue concept - This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept - mainly focusing on Peter
> Red concept - This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept - mainly focusing on Kate
> User testing guide during session 1 - This is the set of questions which we used as a guidance during the user testing session.
User testing session 2 using clickable wire frames
> Clickable wire frames - This is the full set of wire frames used within this merged concept and which we also showed to participants during user testing session 2- it contains all the merged feedback and refinements we got from user testing session 1
> User testing guide during session 2 - This is the set of questions which we used as a guidance during the user testing session.
> Sitemap - This is a visualisation of all the different main pages within the system. A sitemap helps you during designing as wel as to focus on the right tasks during the user testing session.
Refine concept using feedback from user testing session 2
> Final wire frames - This is the full set of wire frames which were the result of the feedback we got from user testing session 2
Creating extreme designs using personas and requirements
We focused on the concepts and requirements which we thought would be most useful and used those to brainstorm and think of ‘extreme’ designs.
This means we were using these extreme ideas to turn them into metaphors which were much easier to use during the design.
E.g. The metaphore or extreme idea of ‘ballroom dancing’ explained the idea that people sometimes spend time together during a project (so dancing together for a while), after a while they split up and work with someone else (splitting up during a dance and start dancing with someone else in the ballroom).
Extreme ideas turned into metaphors and clustered in groups which seemed to have commonalities
User testing session 1 using paper prototypes
At the end of the research phase we ended up with 3 personas. For each of those personas we created a set of frames (representing the pages within a system) so we ended up with 3 main concepts.
These frames are paper prototypes. This makes sure people will give us more honest feedback (and won’t say things like ‘Hmm, I don’t like the colour of that button’ because they’ll see it’s drawn and not finished at all). We wouldn't be focusing on that kind of detailed feedback yet anyway.
We recruited a set of people again, representing all the different people within the university (subject, age, role, etc). Whilst showing them the paper prototypes during this user testing session, we also used a set of questions so we were sure we kept focus on the right things. The location was in a usability lab, having a one-way mirror where the observers took notes on the other side of the mirror. This feedback would than be used to refine the concept.
Green concept: focusing on Isobel who’s really sociable, and outgoing. Therefore the frames of this concept focus on the extreme idea of ‘events-going out’ as this is very important to Isobel.
Green concept paper prototypes
- homepage -
Blue concept: Focusing on Peter who sometimes feels a bit lost. He doesn’t always know what to do first because he’s not always talking to the right people either. Therefore the frames of this concept show the idea of the ‘boardgame’: representing a set of steps you need to fulfil in order to reach your goal.
E.g. In order to fulfil this course, you need to go to this talk, finish this paper etc.
Blue concept paper prototypes
- homepage-
Red concept: Focusing on Kate who’s senior and just wants to save time in any possible way. This set of frames shows the extreme idea of ‘the switchboard’ which makes is possible for Kate just to see the things she’s interested in, not overwhelming her with things which just waste her time.
Red concept paper prototypes
- homepage-
Refine concept using feedback from user testing session 1
We did some brainstorming and used all the feedback from user testing session 1 to merge all the screens and thoughts from the first set of screens into 1 set of screens, representing all the refinements and usable ideas.
Example of a page which got all the feedback merged together
Oszkar redesigning
User testing session 2 using clickable wireframes
This phase was very similar to the first user testing session, which means it was again in the same usability room, with an observer who noted down the feedback. The difference this time was that we used clickable wireframes instead of paper prototypes. This was 1 set of frames instead of 3 because these were merged together. Further, we used again a questionnaire which guided us through the set of tasks.
clickable wire frames
- homepage -
Refine concept using feedback from user testing session 2
We used the feedback to again refine the last version of the frames.
Documents
In the text above, you can find the documents we used during the design phase which might give you a better understanding of the information above.
In case you missed out on them, you can also find them below.
User testing session 1 using paper prototypes
> General information about the concepts - This gives a general description what's meant with each of the concepts
> Green concept - This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept - mainly focusing on Isobel
> Blue concept - This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept - mainly focusing on Peter
> Red concept - This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept - mainly focusing on Kate
> User testing guide during session 1 - This is the set of questions which we used as a guidance during the user testing session.
User testing session 2 using clickable wire frames
> Clickable wire frames - This is the full set of wire frames used within this merged concept and which we also showed to participants during user testing session 2- it contains all the merged feedback and refinements we got from user testing session 1
> User testing guide during session 2 - This is the set of questions which we used as a guidance during the user testing session.
> Sitemap - This is a visualisation of all the different main pages within the system. A sitemap helps you during designing as wel as to focus on the right tasks during the user testing session.
Refine concept using feedback from user testing session 2
> Final wire frames - This is the full set of wire frames which were the result of the feedback we got from user testing session 2
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
It's design time!
The blog has been somewhat quiet of late, as the Academic Networking team have been working mostly offsite through an intense 6 week user-centric design phase. Five weeks down, one (this one) to go!
Oszkar Nagy and Tjhien Liao have been working out of Flow Interactive's London offices, learning from the Flow team as they work. We have gone many phases already, which I can outline very roughly here:
We are now into a final concept refinement round, and Anne-Sophie de Baets is doing a splendid job of documenting all our work so far.
We're looking forward to some reflective time at the end of our 6-week sprint, when we'll be figuring out where to go next (including what to implement in Sakai and when) and also taking the time to wrap up our documentation effort and start to prepare user research results for publication.
Oszkar Nagy and Tjhien Liao have been working out of Flow Interactive's London offices, learning from the Flow team as they work. We have gone many phases already, which I can outline very roughly here:
- figuring out requirements from the user research
- initial ideation of many many small design concepts
- placing those concepts on axes of "user benefit" and "technical difficulty" (this was a tricky one!)
- working up over a dozen concept ideas into rich descriptions (a phase which generated such intriguing concept names as "Ballroom dancing" and "The Spy")
- selecting 3 concepts and refining them into extreme examples reflecting the ideas we had
- user testing some paper prototypes of the concepts
- refinement of the concepts based on user feedback, plus some work to bring them in from the extremes to something more mainstream
- a second round of user testing
We are now into a final concept refinement round, and Anne-Sophie de Baets is doing a splendid job of documenting all our work so far.
We're looking forward to some reflective time at the end of our 6-week sprint, when we'll be figuring out where to go next (including what to implement in Sakai and when) and also taking the time to wrap up our documentation effort and start to prepare user research results for publication.
Friday, 20 March 2009
Planning the design phase
Get ready for our design phase! The next months we’ll be doing user centred design (UCD) which basically means we’ll incorporate all the data we gathered from our research. We’ll do that by looking at the personas, requirements etc.
Oszkar and Tjhien will be spending 6 weeks at Flow Interactive where they’ll have the possibility to work together with people from Flow themselves.
Probably they’ll make various versions of designs which will be user tested from time to time.
Exciting!
Oszkar and Tjhien will be spending 6 weeks at Flow Interactive where they’ll have the possibility to work together with people from Flow themselves.
Probably they’ll make various versions of designs which will be user tested from time to time.
Exciting!
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Bridge between research and design phase
On Friday 13th March until Wednesday 18th March, we had an intensive period of discussions and workshops with the people from Flow Interactive.
These days would be a wrap up of the research phase and a preparation to the design phase, focusing on tweaking the personas so they’re ready for usage during the design phase, writing scenarios based on the personas, and defining the user and business requirements. Defining requirements, based on the personas and therefore also on what real users want, is necessary for the designers to be able to know what approaches should go in the future system in order to answer the users’ needs.
Define user requirements from persona goals
Each persona had a set of goals, focusing on life goals, end goals, experience goals, motivations, and challenges.
We went through each of these goals and rephrased them into requirements.
E.g. From Kate’s persona: ‘Discover what other people are working on.’ Becomes a requirement like this: ‘The user needs to be notified about relevant people or content they wouldn’t otherwise know about.’ K
Writing user scenarios
A user scenario is a good way to feel you one with the persona and to see how this user could eventually use the system. It’s actually a story describing how the user (that particular persona) might use the system and how it’s an answer to his needs. In the end we came up with detailed user scenarios for every persona.
Concept generation
Based on the requirements, we started brainstorming on how these requirements could turn into concepts within the system. This was just a kind of warm up for the design phase, a pool of ideas for future design. Each of those concepts got written down on post-its.
Harriet jotting down concept ideas
Prioritise concepts for design activity
We made a big grid: ‘user value’ against ‘effort required’. We discussed where every post-it note should fit on the grid.
For the further design, we will pin our minds on the post-its in the area ‘high user value’ vs ‘low effort required’.
Team discussing the prioritisation of concepts on grid
Finished prioritisation of concept ideas
Documents
The document below can also be found in text.
> Focus on personas and scenarios - also describing HOW to create these
These days would be a wrap up of the research phase and a preparation to the design phase, focusing on tweaking the personas so they’re ready for usage during the design phase, writing scenarios based on the personas, and defining the user and business requirements. Defining requirements, based on the personas and therefore also on what real users want, is necessary for the designers to be able to know what approaches should go in the future system in order to answer the users’ needs.
Define user requirements from persona goals
Each persona had a set of goals, focusing on life goals, end goals, experience goals, motivations, and challenges.
We went through each of these goals and rephrased them into requirements.
E.g. From Kate’s persona: ‘Discover what other people are working on.’ Becomes a requirement like this: ‘The user needs to be notified about relevant people or content they wouldn’t otherwise know about.’ K
Writing user scenarios
A user scenario is a good way to feel you one with the persona and to see how this user could eventually use the system. It’s actually a story describing how the user (that particular persona) might use the system and how it’s an answer to his needs. In the end we came up with detailed user scenarios for every persona.
Concept generation
Based on the requirements, we started brainstorming on how these requirements could turn into concepts within the system. This was just a kind of warm up for the design phase, a pool of ideas for future design. Each of those concepts got written down on post-its.
Harriet jotting down concept ideas
Prioritise concepts for design activity
We made a big grid: ‘user value’ against ‘effort required’. We discussed where every post-it note should fit on the grid.
For the further design, we will pin our minds on the post-its in the area ‘high user value’ vs ‘low effort required’.
Team discussing the prioritisation of concepts on grid
Finished prioritisation of concept ideas
Documents
The document below can also be found in text.
> Focus on personas and scenarios - also describing HOW to create these
Monday, 2 March 2009
And so the research phase came to an end...
Pretty songs always come to an end, and so does this interesting research phase. Lets summarise what we’ve done during the last months…
Gathering information through diaries and interviews
We wanted to gather information from people who could be possible users of our ‘Academic Networking’ system. Therefore we thought of recruiting users within 3 types of roles – being undergraduates, postgraduates and academics. For each of those groups, we gathered 8 people.
Some people would think “Hmmm…how can only 24 people possibly be a representation of your whole group of stakeholders ?!” We think that is possible, because we chose them quite carefully, selecting people within the spread of different subjects, gender, roles, age, stage within their career, etc.
First of all we recruited undergraduates and made that selection of 8 people. We gave them the task to keep a diary, writing down every time they had a conversation with someone about their work, studies, or research. When they did that, we had an interview with each of them to talk through their diaries and give us some more insight on other things as well. Whilst doing that, we used a questionnaire as well which guided us through the various topics we needed to focus on.
Next, we did exactly the same thing with postgraduates and academics; recruiting, selecting right people, giving them a diary, and having interviews.
recruiting people through an online survey
diary entries
questions used during interview
Task goal analysis and sorting
During the interviews, Harriet was hiding in one of the rooms which got a camera and audio connection so she could follow the interviews without any problems. [See Harriet doing that here] The reason why she was spying on us, was because she was doing a task-goal analysis of all the things participants were saying. This analysis was also colour-coded, which meant we ended up with walls like this after every interview:
task goal analysis
When we finished all the interviews, we started analysing all the entries. Clustering all the data into affinity patterns would give us a better understanding of all the data and would allow us to see the overlaying commonalities between the users as well, whether they were a student or academic.
After doing that clustering, we ended up with a room like this:
affinity sorting
Behavioural axes exercise
Now we had a good understanding of all the users and their underlying ideas and commonalities, we started putting people on grids which contained behavioural axes poles (E.g. High network awareness vs. low network awareness). It’s important we had at least 10- but not more than 15 – behavioural axes. After putting each of our participants on every pole, we clustered them into group. We started seeing patterns of people reappearing together over and over again.
E.g. Sarah and Peter would cluster together on pole 1, and on pole 2, 3, 4 etc.
We ended up with 3 big groups of people clustering together. These would later become ‘personas’ in a way.
behavioural axes exercise with: - behavioural axes and behavioural poles - behavioural patterns (clusters)
Creating personas
The groups we just discovered on the behavioural axes, where the starting points of our persona creation. (If you want to find out more how to create personas, then have a look at our newer posts as we’ll post something more about this in the future.)
After discussing a lot, we ended up with these 3 main personas and 1 ‘negative’ persona as we called it. This means that persona is someone we wouldn’t focus on immediately. Below you'll see the 3 main personas.
Persona 1 (primary persona) - Isobel: Very outgoing and sociable. If she would have a problem or question, she wouldn’t mind asking someone. She also thinks every conversation is valuable (so not only professors are worth having discussions with).
Her network of people is very valuable to her. She’s therefore actively building and maintaining her network as everyone can be useful sometimes.
She really likes to go to events where she can meet people and learn in an active way.
Persona 1 (Primary persona) - Isobel
Persona 2 (secondary persona) - Peter: Someone who rather tries to find solutions about a problem himself by looking in books or going through some other sources before actually asking someone. He just doesn’t like bothering other people. Because he doesn’t like to ask other people that much, he’s not always aware of events or other important things which are going on and because of that, he’s sometimes missing out on information.
Persona 2 (secondary persona)- Peter
Persona 3 (secondary persona) – Kate: Someone senior in her role (can be a senior student or academic), who feels she already learned a lot and now it’s time to give something back to other people. Because she’s so experienced, she perfectly know who to contact in what situation. She’s maintaining her network rather than building it up. Because she’s senior, she has a lot of responsibilities and is very busy. Sometimes she might miss out on some interesting events because she’s too busy.
Persona 3 (secondary persona) - Kate
Documents
In the text above, you can find the documents we used during the research phase, as well as some videos which might give you a better understanding of the information above.
In case you missed out on them, you can also find them below.
> Diary - This is the diary we asked participants to fill in.
> Interview questions - This is a script of the questions we used during the interview
> Personas - This is a digitised version of the 3 personas we ended up with
> Task-goal analysis - A video showing what's going on in the task-goal-analysis-room during the interview. Task-goal analysis in action!
> Affinity sorting - A video showing you how to find themes (clusters) within the bunch of post-its.
> Analysis phase in general & profiles - A short video showing you when creating profiles and some discussion while doing analysis
> Behavioural axes - A short video showing you another use case example which helps you to understand what behavioural axes are
> Interview and task-goal analysis - This video shows you how to do an interview, using diaries, but also showing the task-goal analysis which is going on in another room; a clear runthrough of the different aspects during this complicated process.
Gathering information through diaries and interviews
We wanted to gather information from people who could be possible users of our ‘Academic Networking’ system. Therefore we thought of recruiting users within 3 types of roles – being undergraduates, postgraduates and academics. For each of those groups, we gathered 8 people.
Some people would think “Hmmm…how can only 24 people possibly be a representation of your whole group of stakeholders ?!” We think that is possible, because we chose them quite carefully, selecting people within the spread of different subjects, gender, roles, age, stage within their career, etc.
First of all we recruited undergraduates and made that selection of 8 people. We gave them the task to keep a diary, writing down every time they had a conversation with someone about their work, studies, or research. When they did that, we had an interview with each of them to talk through their diaries and give us some more insight on other things as well. Whilst doing that, we used a questionnaire as well which guided us through the various topics we needed to focus on.
Next, we did exactly the same thing with postgraduates and academics; recruiting, selecting right people, giving them a diary, and having interviews.
recruiting people through an online survey
diary entries
questions used during interview
Task goal analysis and sorting
During the interviews, Harriet was hiding in one of the rooms which got a camera and audio connection so she could follow the interviews without any problems. [See Harriet doing that here] The reason why she was spying on us, was because she was doing a task-goal analysis of all the things participants were saying. This analysis was also colour-coded, which meant we ended up with walls like this after every interview:
task goal analysis
When we finished all the interviews, we started analysing all the entries. Clustering all the data into affinity patterns would give us a better understanding of all the data and would allow us to see the overlaying commonalities between the users as well, whether they were a student or academic.
After doing that clustering, we ended up with a room like this:
affinity sorting
Behavioural axes exercise
Now we had a good understanding of all the users and their underlying ideas and commonalities, we started putting people on grids which contained behavioural axes poles (E.g. High network awareness vs. low network awareness). It’s important we had at least 10- but not more than 15 – behavioural axes. After putting each of our participants on every pole, we clustered them into group. We started seeing patterns of people reappearing together over and over again.
E.g. Sarah and Peter would cluster together on pole 1, and on pole 2, 3, 4 etc.
We ended up with 3 big groups of people clustering together. These would later become ‘personas’ in a way.
behavioural axes exercise with: - behavioural axes and behavioural poles - behavioural patterns (clusters)
Creating personas
The groups we just discovered on the behavioural axes, where the starting points of our persona creation. (If you want to find out more how to create personas, then have a look at our newer posts as we’ll post something more about this in the future.)
After discussing a lot, we ended up with these 3 main personas and 1 ‘negative’ persona as we called it. This means that persona is someone we wouldn’t focus on immediately. Below you'll see the 3 main personas.
Persona 1 (primary persona) - Isobel: Very outgoing and sociable. If she would have a problem or question, she wouldn’t mind asking someone. She also thinks every conversation is valuable (so not only professors are worth having discussions with).
Her network of people is very valuable to her. She’s therefore actively building and maintaining her network as everyone can be useful sometimes.
She really likes to go to events where she can meet people and learn in an active way.
Persona 1 (Primary persona) - Isobel
Persona 2 (secondary persona) - Peter: Someone who rather tries to find solutions about a problem himself by looking in books or going through some other sources before actually asking someone. He just doesn’t like bothering other people. Because he doesn’t like to ask other people that much, he’s not always aware of events or other important things which are going on and because of that, he’s sometimes missing out on information.
Persona 2 (secondary persona)- Peter
Persona 3 (secondary persona) – Kate: Someone senior in her role (can be a senior student or academic), who feels she already learned a lot and now it’s time to give something back to other people. Because she’s so experienced, she perfectly know who to contact in what situation. She’s maintaining her network rather than building it up. Because she’s senior, she has a lot of responsibilities and is very busy. Sometimes she might miss out on some interesting events because she’s too busy.
Persona 3 (secondary persona) - Kate
Documents
In the text above, you can find the documents we used during the research phase, as well as some videos which might give you a better understanding of the information above.
In case you missed out on them, you can also find them below.
> Diary - This is the diary we asked participants to fill in.
> Interview questions - This is a script of the questions we used during the interview
> Personas - This is a digitised version of the 3 personas we ended up with
> Task-goal analysis - A video showing what's going on in the task-goal-analysis-room during the interview. Task-goal analysis in action!
> Affinity sorting - A video showing you how to find themes (clusters) within the bunch of post-its.
> Analysis phase in general & profiles - A short video showing you when creating profiles and some discussion while doing analysis
> Behavioural axes - A short video showing you another use case example which helps you to understand what behavioural axes are
> Interview and task-goal analysis - This video shows you how to do an interview, using diaries, but also showing the task-goal analysis which is going on in another room; a clear runthrough of the different aspects during this complicated process.
Monday, 23 February 2009
even museums are networking socially now
Spotted on the BBC News site: UK museums, including the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, are setting up a new joint website which will let users build communities around museum content. It's the National Museums Online Learning project and you can read about it here.
The value of social networking features to people who are both enjoying the collections and learning at the same time is something we hope we may be able to bring out in our project, too.
The value of social networking features to people who are both enjoying the collections and learning at the same time is something we hope we may be able to bring out in our project, too.
Friday, 13 February 2009
Phase III of our research gets under way...
Just a quick update for those following our research into the uses of social networking in an academic context.
Having interviewed 8 undergraduates and 8 post-graduate students in Phases I and II of our research, we're now onto Phase III, interviewing a diverse collection of academics associated with the University, from people at the start of their careers to a leading Professor, from someone returning part-time after a career break to people holding both departmental and college posts.
We're eagerly anticipating the analysis phase that will be coming up after this, as we try to synthesise the concerns, goals and motivations across the different groups of University members.
Having interviewed 8 undergraduates and 8 post-graduate students in Phases I and II of our research, we're now onto Phase III, interviewing a diverse collection of academics associated with the University, from people at the start of their careers to a leading Professor, from someone returning part-time after a career break to people holding both departmental and college posts.
We're eagerly anticipating the analysis phase that will be coming up after this, as we try to synthesise the concerns, goals and motivations across the different groups of University members.
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