Design Challenge II/III - The End and New Beginnnings

The end of Design Challenge II came as the final pitch was presented.

 Overall, the group was happy with our various performances, and we ended up all celebrating after the final pitch. The feedback received (after the pitch) was a great encouragement and are thankful that it is finally over.

Replacing it is Design Challenge III - Improving Orientation Week

 The new team formed under people who shared interest in doing the same task seemed dedicated and focused. We needed to create a solution to improve the university's orientation week. So we began by empathizing with the users by identifying the various stakeholders and how they viewed orientation day. Then we began to define the various issues with orientation day using those stakeholder's point of view and continued ideating ideas and problems. Thus during the time in the workshop, we had both accomplished initial "Empathizing" and "Defining" of the problems of our final Design Challenge.

We asked all team members to ideate several new ideas and problems for the team meeting that was coming, and overall we came to several agreed-upon ideas:

• The Pre-Orientation was not well enough advertised. With Orientation Day's "lecture" being on how to enrol in your course, many students would have found it more useful to go to Pre-Orientation if they knew about it
• The Orientation Week was too clustered and was not organized. 
• A Easily Obtainable and Accessible Brochure with the location of each individual stall was not available and needed to be available

Using those Problem Definitions, our group entered the "Ideation" design thinking mode and started to ideate ideas for our various problems.

Overall, our team was off to a good start with several good, but easy-to implement ideas coming into play. I believe I have performed well in the first week, with the organizing of the first team meeting (place, time and ensuring members got there). The team worked well and everyone respected each other's ideas no matter how stupid or silly it sounded. (Renting the Botanical Gardens to expand the area and decrease clustering). 

Design Challenge II - Week 4

This is Week 4 of the Design Challenge II - The Mobile App

With the holidays over, the group decided to finalize the Final Prototypes to be used in the speech.

The former prototype led to interviews with several people and obtaining user feedback to further improve our application. We entered the "Show, Don't Tell", "Experiment" and "Empathy" Design Thinking Mindsets to further our design. We went through the "Empathizing", "Prototype" and "Test" Design thinking modes all in the week due to time constraints we weren't really prepared for.
We thus went through several interviews and improved the application a little bit at the time -
Some of these changes included:

• Changing the Categories Button
• Improving the Overall Anesthetic
• Adding a Booking Feature
• Adding Hallal and other religious food search options

Changing our application based on the user feedback allowed us to empathize with users and consider problems we did not consider when first creating the application. The opinions from the surveys also made us consider re-defining our target audience several times across the project as it expanded from a student focused application to an application to assist everybody in Australia.
Luckily most of these changes were minor and began to go into the "Ideating" Design thinking mode to create ways to implement the different feedback and changes so that the application would be ready for the final presentation.
This week was a rush, as stated before, with the screens needing to be finished for the final presentation along with a new script. We recreated the idea of 2nd Team meetings to assist in transitioning the changes and completing the task to all of our liking. We could and should've started over the holidays but the lack of doing so meant the environment that we worked in wasn't the best. I could've reminded the team to have done some stuff over the holidays but it all worked out as we finished it on the morning of that workshop.

Design Challenge II - Week 3

This is Week 3 of the Design Challenge II - The Mobile App

The week, just before the holidays, I turned out sick and reported it to the team members as per our previously announced, Team Compact.
It also meant it was my responsibility to read up and catch up to the work that was meant to be done that workshop/team meeting..
We had just finished prototyping and testing our low fidelity prototype with the workshop and gathered feedback from each of them. Which meant now we had to work on beginning the medium-high fidelity prototype with additional testing with our target audience.

Finishing the "Testing" phase of our Design Challenge, we had reverted back into the prototyping phase to make improvements on our current design. We were focused on improving the current design and working towards a solution. While this was not a correct application of "rapid prototyping", we felt obligated to do so due to the "time constraint" and the group not wanting to do anything over the holidays.
We assigned each individual team member roles with me in charge of putting all the portions together. Since I had to wait upon everyone's part and I was sick, all I did this week was interviewing several members of our target audience (friends) to finish off the Testing phase for our low fidelity prototype.

Overall, this week, I hindered the group slightly due to illness, however managed to finish the interviews and enter the holidays with the first "cycle" of the design thinking process completed. The team went well as we kept each other up to date with the various pieces of information, things we needed to do and the due dates even during the holidays (although nobody did anything). I could've been a better team member by being more able-bodied and attended the workshop so I could join with the competitor analysis however the team had decided that they will finish it themselves. With my assistance I believe the team would have been more productive and be a better environment.