These project was a collaboration between Matt Colyer, Natalia Creamer, Dan Rice, and Brian Shih. The purpose of the project was to reinforce and practice the concepts covered in the lectures and readings throughout the HFID class. The final deliverable was not supposed to be a fully working product but rather a high fidelity prototype which would mimic the core features of the system but not require an extensive amount of engineering effort. The problem statement below outlines the difficulties we thought should be addressed from the outset.
Problem Statement
Using current calendaring solutions, it is often difficult to view others or an aggregate of schedules. There are several different types of calendar programs available but they are all intended for use by single users and lack features that assist in sharing and collaboration. Additionally, current courseware systems offer little integration with calendaring solutions by way of class assignments and tasks. Furthermore, there is a large time investment involved with organizing and maintaining an electronic calendar. This can also result in others from sharing the most up to date information, rendering the shared calendar useless.
Process
In the first phase of the project we created two user personas from our user interviews. Once we had given our personas personalities, we created a lexicon to describe the various aspects of a system identified by our users in their initial interviews.
In the second phase of the project we created several scenarios that our two personas might commonly encounter in their routine use of the system.
In the third phase of the project we created several (one, two and three) paper prototypes (or low fidelity prototype) of an interface which would address the scenarios created in the second phase. The idea behind paper prototypes is that it is cheap and easy to make modifications to them. The more technology involved in prototyping the more expensive it becomes to alter the prototypes. We then took these paper prototype and had our users interact with them and recorded the results.
In the fourth phase of the project we incorporated the results from our paper prototype into a simple interactive prototype. We then iterated this a second and third each time incorporating user feedback to the latest prototype.
My Role
I actively collaborated with my team in the interviews of users, the creation of personas and the creation of scenarios. Once the prototyping began I adapted most of the javascript and the css to incorporate the changes from our interviews.
Conclusion
The project definitely made the concepts covered in the course alot more tangible and the final prototype implemented some cool ideas I have yet to see implemented in a calendaring system.