Sunday, April 13, 2014

Design Challenge II - Week 2


This is the Week 2 of the Design Challenge 2 - Mobile App.
This week, we are officially creating and refining the paper-prototypes for "Are You Hungry" and slotted them into a Powerpoint Presentation for a Presentation.
With the group's final application selection chosen to be the "Are Your Hungry" Application, we continued to "Prototype" design thinking mode to enter the "Test" Design Thinking mode. Using the "Collaboration" and "Mindfulness" design thinking mindsets, we created a powerpoint presentation with the low fidelity prototype we had done last week.
This Presentation is considered a low-medium fidelity prototype to be presented or tested so we can obtain feedback to improve the application.
This feedback obtained from the presentation will help us when we ideate ideas on how to improve our mobile application.



Paper-Prototyping


Prototype Slideshow in Development

This week was fairly uneventful as it was mainly tying up loose ends. We each had to do a portion of the powerpoint and was rushing to get it done so we could co-ordinate our scripts. To do this more efficient and effectively we had organized a 2nd group meeting on most weeks so that we could coordinate our scripts and portion at the same place and time. Overall this 2nd group meeting was an idea that assisted our team in being more productive in this stage of the Design Challenge and was beneficial. I could've rehearsed and organized the team to rehearse our speech several times before the main performance however.


Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Design Challenge Part II - The First Week

This week, we have moved on to Design Challenge II - A mobile phone application.
 We've formed new groups for this Design Challenge - based on our personalities measured by the MBTI Test and a survey to calculate our respective "de Bono Hat" color.
In the first week, we have found our new team to work quite well, with the "Blue Hat" or leader of the group keeping the discussions alive with regular additions from everyone. There hasn't been any issues as of early on, which is always a promising sign for the success of the Design Challenge ahead.


This week we've started quickly with the "Ideating" Design thinking mode. We had briefly read the assignment and considered to brainstorm various application ideas using the "collaboration" design thinking mindset. We also utilized the "Empathizing" design thinking mindset as we thought of what iPhone users want or need in an application.
We continued to ideate ideas until the next team meeting where we pooled our ideas of the mobile app together and voted democratically on the two application ideas we believe to have to most potential to be popular and fit best within the user community.

The two application ideas were
  1. Are You Hungry? - A budget food location service
  2. Quick Details - A more grouped-based Contact List



After we had ideated our 2 mobile application ideas, we entered the "Prototype" design thinking mindsets where we were supposed to construct several low-fidelity prototypes of our respective application. At the next workshop, we will test our ideas with each other and the co-ordinator to decide on the idea to move forward with.

This week, the team had worked well together with every member doing their share of the workload. Our group had lacked the ability to correctly utilize the "define" design thinking mode as we brainstormed our application idea as we simply decided to create any application that would fill any need. If I had properly reminded the group to define a problem and create application ideas around that problem, the application ideas would have been more focused and be overall more productive.