This week I had a lot going on, as it’s the midterm week. I had a midterm, a project due and a lot of work in this class.
Starting at the beginning of this week on Tuesday we collected the cultural probes kits from our user group and in class (Tuesday) we analyzed each kit. I was curious to see how our user group responses. Each kit had a different response and the group was diverse. At first, my group and I was looking for some of the commonalities in the group. We discovered that most of the group are outgoing, they like to be social, also they are too busy. After analyzing the kit in class, we started writing Cultural Probes Analysis document. Also, we included a summary of the outcomes of the kit.
On Wednesday, I interviewed one of our user group (Sridarsh , the Vice president) with my teammate. We started the interview with warm-up questions and then we started asking the domain questions. The interview was more than 15 minutes. It went really well as we had a lot of information about the group that we didn’t know. Not to mention this day was hard for me as I had to do the interview at the same time I had a midterm for my other class (CSS), prepare my other class project and do the readings for this class.
On Thursday, we had the reading due “Observation” and “Participant Observation”. After reading these readings and discussing it in class, it made me think about the interview on Wednesday and how we used these methods. It also made us think about our next interview and how we should be conducting it. There are two types of participation; Marginal participants and Full participants that we could have. After discussing the reading in class, we saw a video about how to analyze the interview and how to code it. I liked the steps that were shown like “quantitative analysis of interview data”. It showed us how to start analyzing the script. However, the video was boarding and I got distracted, as it was long.
Moving forward with our user group. We started brainstorming the poster in class on Thursday. We were looking for inspirations for the poster and we were kind of lost on what to create. So after class, we decided to create two posters and see how it goes.
With all the things we had to do on Thursday, we were scheduling two interviews with our user group that was hard to maintain. The first interview was 30 minutes and we had a lot of similar information. The second interview was with the president of the Delta Sigma Pi (Emily); the interview was the longest (more than 40 minutes). From the interviews we did, I got more information about the club and what they do. I feel the personal questions we asked them had diverse responses, but the questions about the club were pretty similar responses.
The last day of the week (Friday), we presented our poster to the class. We didn’t have the chance to present the two posters so we just presented one of them. We got all of the feedback from our professor and classmates. It was difficult for us to hear the critique without explaining to them “why” we had the thing on the poster. We thought this poster was for us, therefore we created some images to represent the outcomes of the kit. We know what the meaning of them, however after getting the critique we had to change the design of the poster, add text to explain some outcomes and add images of the outcomes to show evidence of the outcomes. I feel this assignment (poster) didn’t have a guide on what to do and what’s required. We were lost and didn’t know what to do. After getting the feedback, we decided as a group to have an online group meeting to discuss what to create for theposter. At the end, we created something that includes all the critique we got also we followed the rubric. We were all finally satisfied about the final poster iteration.
Some lessons I have learned from this week:
I need to be patient about a lot of things such as waiting for the user group response . Also, design something for other people taste is hard. I feel it’s tricky to design something you like then when you show it to others they don’t like it. Finally, this week schedule was busy (scheduling interviews, doing the posters. Kit analysis) with all other classes work. I believe this taught me to organize my work even though I seem to have a lot of things going on.
In brief, I knew this week is going to be intense however my teammates were collaborative and we did the work!
First poster iteration