Institutional Innovation » Academic Networking http://planet.inin.jisc-ssbr.net Planet site for the Institutional Innovation Programme Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:05:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Final report http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/06/final-report.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/06/final-report.html#comments Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:21:50 +0000 Laura James http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/06/final-report.html Here it is: PDF.
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/06/final-report.html/feed/ 0 Closing summary http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/closing-summary.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/closing-summary.html#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:08:39 +0000 Laura James http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/closing-summary.html As the project comes to an end, and we pack away our few remaining postit notes for future user-centric design work, we report here the Executive Summary from our final report, including a high level view of our key learnings which other HEIs can benefit from.





Background

The genesis of this project was in the rapid rise of social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and their uptake by academics and students. Earlier projects suggested that while using social networking sites exposed various privacy and IP problems, users found their interactions with these sites more rewarding than using institutional software. We wished to bring the affordances of these commercial systems to higher education, but in a fashion that allowed us to adapt them to academic purposes and requirements. We were also interested in the growing use of user-centric design (UCD), as design is an increasingly important factor in software creation in the HE world. We undertook user research into communications related to teaching and learning in the undergraduate, postgraduate and academic staff populations, to identify user needs, and took this forward with design work and user testing, then development work in Sakai3, building upon the gadget architecture of Apache Shindig. To do this, we worked with a commercial user design company (Flow Interactive), and Flow staff supported, worked with and trained our nascent UCD team; this was made possible by their willingness to engage in knowledge transfer, and other institutions should be aware that this kind of activity is open to them.



Gadgetry

Although we have not moved forward with Shindig within Sakai at this stage, we acknowledge that the gadget architecture is powerful and believe that a gadget framework (Shindig or Wookie) will be valuable as the project moves forward. More importantly, we have found the gadget model to be a key factor in designing and developing powerful next generation interfaces, and the entire Sakai3 UI is structured around gadgets, making it easy to work with and modify. Thus the concepts behind our original choice of Shindig have come through in our final and ongoing work, even if the detail did not.



User-centric design: learning on the job

Flow felt that UCD is a scalable process, and were confident of some successful outcome at any budget. This is because for creative work such as design, and the well understood discipline of UCD, do not have “one right answer” – there are many potential reasonably good solutions, even with limited time and resources (compared to not attempting UCD). This means that even modest projects should be able to get good outputs of some sort using these methods.



User-centric design outputs

We have substantially added to the body of knowledge relating to user-centric design practice in UK HE, especially as regards emerging technologies such as social networking and other Web2 and new media systems. As well as experimenting with new methodologies, sharing with others how they might use these methods, and evaluating our experiences, our work has generated some concepts for designs and systems which we have not been able to take forward in this project, but which we hope that we, or others, will be able to take forward in the future. In particular, some of the early concepts from the user-centric design phase are engaging and intriguing, and will be worthy of further exploration. We also produced a range of materials for others who wish to undertake user-centred design in the HE sector, allowing them to benefit from our experience (our main handbook has been used at Georgia Tech, Michigan, and elsewhere).



User-centric design reflections

A full user-centric design process can be a powerful method for uncovering academic user needs and wants, which would not be uncovered by a project team working instead through a prototype&test iteration process (which may be more conventional in HE), and can lead to more usable IT systems in HE which address needs which might otherwise have been missed. To achieve this, a clear research question must be posed, and a team where technology-lead thinking is balanced with design and user-focussed thinking is essential throughout. Strong team working and group communication (using many methods and channels, as sharing design thoughts can be challenging) is also important. Nonetheless, there are real challenges in UCD, in communicating design work to stakeholders who have not been engaged throughout the process in detail, and in empowering stakeholders to assess design outputs effectively.



Social features in academic software

This project has hugely enhanced the capabilities of a major open source VLE/VRE (Sakai), by adding in scholarly networking functionality, including the ability for academics and students to communicate easily and flexibly, in the engaging manner pioneered by Facebook, but within an academic context and around learning and research content. Sakai3 will have social and collaborative aspects in every part of the system, with seamless creation and sharing content of all types throughout. Complex projects, whether VLEs or other systems, which seek to add social features or to evolve to more socially-oriented versions, should take a holistic viewpoint from the start, and tackle these problems across their systems, rather than attempting to retrofit small social widgets to existing platforms. User research, seeking answers to one or more well thought out research questions, is a strong way to start this sort of redesign effort.
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/closing-summary.html/feed/ 0 All the outputs there are http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-outputs-there-are.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-outputs-there-are.html#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:50:52 +0000 Laura James http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-outputs-there-are.html Anne-Sophie has produced a wonderful list of all of the project outputs. This will be included in our completion report, but I’m also reproducing it here as I’m sure people will find it useful.





GENERAL OUTPUTS – Showing the complete picture



* The blog

The blog describes the stages through the project. It also contains a lot of pictures taken during the project, and references to other interesting related projects or blogs.



* the handbook (short version)

This handbook (20 pages – here and here) gives you the methodology description of the user research and user-centric design parts 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.

This output was also presented at Birmingham, using a flyer to promote it.



* the handbook (long version)

This handbook (107 pages – here and here) is the full version of the shorter handbook. It contains much more details, examples and pictures… We would recommend reading the short version rather than this one, but it might be helpful if you want to reproduce such a project yourself.





OUTPUTS FROM RESEARCH PHASE (FIRST PHASE)

The links for the research phase outputs are below, but you can also find them (with matching pictures) here.



DATA GATHERING



* diary

This is the diary template we created and used during our project to gather data. Feel free to use it as well.



* Interview questions script

We also did interviews to gather data. This is the script with question we used when doing these interviews.



ANALYSING THE GATHERED DATA



* Video overview of doing an 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 run-through of the different aspects during this complicated process



* Task-goal analysis video

This video is just a snapshot while we were doing some task-goal analysis. It doesn’t tell you exactly how to do it, but it can definitely give you a good idea if you want to do it yourself.



* Affinity sorting video

A video showing you how to find themes (clusters) within the bunch of post-its. It doesn’t tell you exactly how to do it, but it can definitely give you a good idea if you want to do it yourself.



* Profiles close-up video

This is a snapshot whilst writing up profiles. It doesn’t tell you exactly how to do it, but it can definitely give you a good idea of what it is if you want to do it yourself.



* Behavioural axes video

Someone from Flow explaining to us what this exercise is about. It doesn’t tell you exactly how to do it, but it’s a good example to get an idea what this exercise is about.



* Personas

This is a digitised version of the 3 personas we ended up with, as a major output from our research phase.



BRIDGE BETWEEN RESEARCH AND DESIGN PHASE

You can also find this (with matching pictures) here.



* Focus on personas and scenarios

This document gives an overview of our personas and their relating scenarios. It also gives you some hints and tips on how to create these.





OUTPUTS FROM DESIGN PHASE (SECOND PHASE)

The links for the design phase outputs are below, but you can also find them (with matching pictures) here.



USER TESTING SESSION 1: USING PAPER PROTOTYPES



* General information about our 3 concepts

This gives a general description of what is meant by each of the concepts.



* Green concept paper prototypes

This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept – mainly focusing on Isobel. Feel free to use this as an example or inspiration.



* Blue concept paper prototypes

This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept – mainly focusing on Peter. Feel free to use this as an example or inspiration.



* Red concept paper prototypes

This is the full set of paper prototype frames used within this concept – mainly focusing on Kate. Feel free to use this as an example or inspiration.



* User testing guide during session 1

This is the set of questions which we used as a guidance during the first user testing session.



* Video on how to do user testing

A brief example video which shows you a real user testing session so you get an idea of what a user testing is like.

This outcome was also presented at Birmingham, using a flyer to promote it.



USER TESTING SESSION 2: USING CLICKABLE WIRE FRAMES



* Set of 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 second user testing session.



* Site map

This is a visualisation of all the different main pages within the system. A sitemap helps you during designing as well as to focus on the right tasks during the user testing session.



REFINE LAST VERSION CLICKABLE WIRE FRAMES AFTER USER TESTING



* Set of 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.





OUTPUTS FROM CODING PHASE (THIRD PHASE)

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. This outcome was also presented at Birmingham, using a flyer to promote it.



The links for the coding phase outputs are below, but you can also find them here.



* Kernel code repository

http://github.com/ieb/open-experiments



* UX code repository

http://github.com/oszkarnagy/3akai-ux





OUTPUTS FROM PRESENTATIONS AND WORKSHOPS



SAKAI CONFERENCE IN BOSTON, MA

* Sakai presentation PowerPoint

This presentation on Slideshare was used at the Sakai conference at Boston, presenting the methodology and some outputs like the personas etc.



OXFORD ASSEMBLY ON STAKEHOLDER BUY-IN

* The Academic Networking presentation about stakeholder buy-in at the BRII assembly in Oxford

This presentation was used at the BRII assembly in Oxford, presenting the approaches from the Academic Networking project which are specifically useful when targeting stakeholders.



* Handbook on how to involve stakeholders efficiently

This tick-box-shaped document isn’t a walkthrough roadmap, but a list of initiatives you can choose from based on our experiences from the Academic Networking project, in order to involve your stakeholders in an efficient way.

This outcome was also presented at Birmingham, using a flyer to promote it.



ASSEMBLY/WORKSHOPS ON PERSONAS AND HOW TO DO USER TESTING

The links for the assembly outputs are below, but you can also find the full list (with matching pictures) here.

These links are a set of outputs which can be used if you would like to replicate or undertake a similar workshop yourself. Originally this set of documents would also contain some documents which were already mentioned before (like the persona examples), but below you only see those which weren’t mentioned yet.

This output was also presented at Birmingham, using a flyer to promote it.



* Persona and user testing workshop PowerPoint

This presentation was used during the assembly, focusing on how to create personas yourself and undertake user testing. This presentation can be used if you would like to undertake such a workshop yourself.



* Persona template

In addition to the examples of the persona we created ourselves, this template of how a persona looks like should give you an idea on how to get started creating one yourself.



* Description of fictive users

You could use this set of ‘fictive users’ as a set of data when creating personas yourself as an exercise.



* General list of tips when creating a set of questions to use during user testing

This list of hints and tips should help you when creating a list of questions to use during user testing.
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-outputs-there-are.html/feed/ 0 Assembly on personas and user testing http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/assembly-on-personas-and-user-testing.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/assembly-on-personas-and-user-testing.html#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:01:44 +0000 Anne-Sophie http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/assembly-on-personas-and-user-testing.html 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
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/assembly-on-personas-and-user-testing.html/feed/ 0 Product 1 – Find out how to use user-centric design! http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-1-find-out-how-to-use-user.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-1-find-out-how-to-use-user.html#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:00:28 +0000 Anne-Sophie http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-1-find-out-how-to-use-user.html 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
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-1-find-out-how-to-use-user.html/feed/ 0 Product 2 – Find out how to involve stakeholders efficiently! http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-2-find-out-how-to-involve.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-2-find-out-how-to-involve.html#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:23:03 +0000 Anne-Sophie http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-2-find-out-how-to-involve.html 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
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/01/product-2-find-out-how-to-involve.html/feed/ 0 And so the research phase came to an end… http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/03/and-so-research-phase-came-to-end.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/03/and-so-research-phase-came-to-end.html#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:52:18 +0000 Anne-Sophie http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/03/and-so-research-phase-came-to-end.html 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.

]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/03/and-so-research-phase-came-to-end.html/feed/ 0 Academic Networking within your Virtual Learning Environment http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/academic-networking-within-your-virtual.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/academic-networking-within-your-virtual.html#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:04:51 +0000 Anne-Sophie http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/academic-networking-within-your-virtual.html 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 .
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/academic-networking-within-your-virtual.html/feed/ 0 Even more documenting! http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/09/even-more-documenting.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/09/even-more-documenting.html#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:55:20 +0000 Anne-Sophie http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/09/even-more-documenting.html 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.
]]> http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/09/even-more-documenting.html/feed/ 0 And so the design phase came to an end http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/05/and-so-design-phase-came-to-end.html http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/05/and-so-design-phase-came-to-end.html#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:55:00 +0000 Anne-Sophie http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2009/05/and-so-design-phase-came-to-end.html 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
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