1. Lectures
Watch the week 3 lecture videos.
2. Reading
Choose 1-2 of the videos or articles from the reading list this week. Enter your reading reflection (250 word max) into the week 3 entry of the design notebook. Put your full name in bracket after the reading reflection paragraph. More details are available under Deliverable 1.c.
3. Set up Miro and Figma
You will need Miro next week, and Figma during the last few weeks of the course. Sign up for an account for both Miro and Figma using your uWaterloo email, and apply for their Education plans:
● https://miro.com/education/
● https://www.figma.com/education/
4. Prepare for Interviews
First, using the personas as a guide, decide who the participants for your user interviews will be. Second, draft the interview questions. Using the empathy maps, decide what do you need/want to know. Come up with 3 high-level questions. For each high-level question, come up with at least 5 specific interview questions. In total, you should have 3 high-level questions, and 15 specific questions. Think about what are good vs bad questions. Finally, describe your plan of where to find users, your procedure for contacting users and interviewing them, and how many users you plan to interview each week.
5. Mock Interview with Buddy Team
Do a mock interview with 1 person from the buddy team. Pretend this is the real thing and go through all the steps (e.g., explain, obtain consent, interview, wrap up with thank you letter). During the interview, check the time often so that you don’t run over 15 minutes. Take notes. After the interviews, update the design notebook to summarize what you learned, including any surprises. Describe any changes to your interview questions and procedure based on what you found.
Based on the mock interview, provide your the buddy team with 5 recommendations on how their interview questions and procedures can be improved. The receiving team should describe which recommendation they find useful and might incorporate. Details are available under Deliverable 3.d. The writeup should go into the week 3 entry of the design notebook.
6. Interview 1-2 Users
Find a user to interview; someone you know or another student in CS449/649 who is not in your team and not in your buddy team. You can use the #interview-exchange channel to coordinate.
Make sure you obtain their verbal consent responses, and store these responses in a spreadsheet in a password-protected computer, data server or cloud service; the TAs and instructors might ask to see this spreadsheet at a later time. Keep your raw interview data private and viewable to your team only; DO NOT put the raw data (notes and images) in the design notebook. In the design notebook, you just have to summarize your findings from the interviews. Make sure that the data is anonymized and stored in a password-protected computer, data server or cloud service. In the raw data or any report summarizing the data, interviewees should be referred to by their code names (e.g., P1, P16) instead of their real names. For each interview, add a section to the design notebook to capture (1) a summary of your findings, (2) a description of any changes to your interview questions or procedures that you plan to introduce in future interviews based on what you learned.
An important note: your interviewees must be adult (age 19+). Our ethics protocol does NOT allow you to interview children. Note that the definition of minor varies by province. To be safe, interview someone who is 19+. You should also stay away from interviewing students/employees in K-12 schools and hospital staff (e.g., doctor, nurses), because doing so would involve the school board's and the hospital's ethics board. If you were to interview an employee of a company/organization about work-related things, you will also need permission from their manager before conducting the interviews with the employees.
Informational Interviews happen mostly during the week of 3, 4 and 5. You could interview 2-3 users per week; but you can spread out the interviews any way you like! For example, you could do 1 this week, then 3 the following week, and the remaining 2-4 during week 5. It's up to you. Just make sure that in total, you interview 6-8 unique people who are meant to be your target user (people who are likely going to be the primary audience for your app).
7. Challenge Report #1.
Complete challenge report #1 in the design notebook. This challenge report focuses on your assumptions about the target users, and what you have learned through the interviews that challenge these assumptions. Be specific. For example, when we ask you "how did you go about testing these assumptions", don't just say that we did interviews. Of course, we know that you have done interviews. So, be more specific and talk about the types of questions that help to break/verify your assumptions, etc. Give concrete examples whenever you can. Make the report interesting and something that other students can benefit learning from. This advice applies to all the challenge reports in this course.
Due Friday (May 28)
● Design Notebook Entry (1.c, 3.b, 3.d) - the entry should capture your attendance to team meeting, your individual reflection, the documentation of your design activities (including draft interview questions, mock interview results), and buddy team feedback.
● User Interviews - Informational Interview (3.a) - complete the writeup by adding a section to your design notebook week 3 entry.
● Challenge Report #1 (3.c) - complete the writeup in the design notebook.