Time sure flies and it’s the last day of actual work! Today we were finalising me-fi prototypes, finishing up posters and adding blog posts for tomorrow presentations. Everybody did a great job and managed to come up with an impressive body of work!

Presentation, Friday 24.7

Prepare for presenting your project in the morning.

Things that you can show and tell about:

• How did you came up with the idea
• Your design process – personas, scenarios, use cases and user stories/use cases.
  • What changed during the way?
  • Did your prototype matched the original scenarios and user stories/use cases.
• Paper prototypes
  • What did you found out during paper prototype testing?
  • If you didn’t do testing, what would you test? Which part of the design is the most unclear?
• Demo – show your prototype in practice
• Recap
  • What would you add  to or change in your solution?
  • How would you develop it further?
  • What approaches you did not use? What approaches were the most helpful for you?
• Feedback about the course

For presentation use your poster, blog and the demo.

Around 10:15 we are heading to TV-Tower to check their renovated exposition and then will have some coffee with a view 🙂

In the end of our session we were joined by TLU researcher and teacher, PhD Vladimir Tomberg. Slides from his exciting lecture are available here:

Some shots of todays activities:

We are reaching the point of our course where everything unwraps simultaneously: some of you designing a logo, while some testing an interactive prototype or starting with poster design.

As we already discussed in the class — make sure to challenge yourself and go out of the comfort-zone. If you are someone with developer’s background try to venture into depths of Photoshop and come up with a poster representing your team and your project. And on the contrary, in case you are used to graphic design, make sure you will learn something new by working on prototype or conducting user testing sessions.

Best of luck, Friday is coming!

Todays presentation with some graphic design tips for beginners:

Ksenia slides to be inserted here later 🙂

Photos from today’s session:

Reminder

In the next two days:

1. Finalize medium-fidelity prototype, test it, make needed changes. Deadline 24.7, 9:00.
2. Create a project logo and a poster. Deadline 23.07, 16:00. 

Today we are going to start with graphic design part of our course and create a logo for your application as well as poster for upcoming presentation of the projects, which will take place on Friday, 24th of July.

Poster specs

• Size: A3, portrait or landscape 29,7 x 42,0 cm
• 3mm bleeds
• Ideas for the content (use some or all):
  • Project name
  • Project logo
  • Prototype screenshot
  • Main concept / idea
    • What problem were you solving?
    • What were the goals?
    • Main problems and solutions
  •  Team
    • Who did what
    • (Photos)
  • Roadmap
    • What did you during the workshop?
    • What approaches (e.g. persona) did you used?
  • Photos from the process (e.g. usability testing)

Today’s presentation:

Creating poster and logo will help you to decide on colour palette and graphical style of your future application’s User Interface. Logo presentation can be found here:

Photos from today’s session:

Next step for us is designing!
Although the final product is expected to be digital solution, we will start with some very “analog” tools at the beginning — paper.

Photos from today’s session:

We are moving towards the very essence of the interaction design — shaping users behaviour and providing them with good user experience… But in order to do that we need to know who is our user? What are his goals? How can we (and technology) help this user to achieve his goals? Lets find out:

Homework for Thu 16.7

In your blog: Compose at least one persona for your project, listing his/her background, goals, etc. Add a scenario and user stories, without focusing on any concrete visual interface details. Think of “doing” and what can be done with the help of your product/service.

Photos from today’s session:

What we did

Today was really productive: we had A LOT of ideas pitched and it was really hard to make a short-list out of 13 valid problems.
After some discussion 4 teams were formed and 4 project blogs were created:

• Easy Dashboard — Simplified dashboard with accessible UI for elderly people
• ReDress — App to connect second hand shops and second hand shoppers
• Travel Master — Service to help people with travel packing
• ToOldTown — Educational service allowing to see historical transformations of Old Town locations

Photos from today

Room S-244 (Silva building, corridor between Astra and Mare buildings.)

Plan for the day

Today we will hear your ideas, select and merge few of them and assemble 3-4 teams (4 would be perfect!).
Goal: by the end of the session, we will have three-four clear problem setting and a general idea for a workshop project.

To get the discussion started we will try Edvard De Bono‘s “six hats” approach that works as an aid for brainstorming, certain type of thinking and decision making.

Plan for the day:

• Idea pitching: explain briefly your thoughts
• Rearranging ideas, finding similarities, merging
• Forming teams – try to find a good skill balance for your team
• Brainstorming
• Opening a team blog (Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Squarespace…) – 1 blog per team
• Outlining problem setting in a new post

Homework for Wed 15.07:

Please add a link to your blog (containing it’s first post!) to this post.