Team Design Journal: ITERATE + TEST 2

To recap, last week we tested our lo-fidelity 1.0 prototype. This prototype was used to test only the content of our design journal with two user groups – those with high familiarity with DFA and those with low familiarity with DFA. This is a snapshot of what lo-fi 1.0 looks like: Feedback on lo-fi 1.0: Our team consistently heard from both test groups that our text was too abstract and used a lot of inaccessible language. Resulting action: We went through our content and looked at the words that our test users said they had no context for — if we … Continue reading Team Design Journal: ITERATE + TEST 2

Team Design Journal: TEST

This week we completed the first phase of our testing process. We presented lo-fidelity prototypes of four different pieces to be included in the Design Journal: a project snapshot, an interview with community partner, an interview with a studio lead, and an interview with a team lead. This week we only tested content. To accomplish this, we printed out text without any fancy layout, just to see if people were able to digest the text. In general, there were some common observations across all pieces. Readers often commented that they were unfamiliar with some information crucial to understanding the design process … Continue reading Team Design Journal: TEST

Team Design Journal: BUILD

  Our team’s doing it! The remainder of the semester will be spent riding a build-test-iterate-test-iterate-test-present train. And we’re doing it! This week we compiled our lo-fidelity prototype (“lo-fi 1”) comprised of four content blocks. We have a “snapshot” template for a DFA project, a community partner interview, a team lead interview, and a studio lead interview. All four have an emphasis on lessons learned and/or social impact, reflecting our user research findings from earlier in the semester. We’ll be testing later today and hope to have results ready to publish for next week’s blog post. We’re doing it!!! Continue reading Team Design Journal: BUILD

Team Design Journal: IDEATE/MSR

  For this step of the design process, we were focused on ideating different ways to breakdown and approach the design journal. To recap, our original broad HCW statement was: How can we create a design journal that students can use to publish and share their projects? After reflecting on our key insights, and reframing, we narrowed our HCW statement to: How can we teach a reader human-centered design after reading one issue of the journal?  Overall, our two main design goals are to convey the lessons learned during the design process, and to make “DFlAnguage” accessible to the broader … Continue reading Team Design Journal: IDEATE/MSR

Team Design Journal: REFRAME

After a fruitful immerse phase, we sat down and synthesized the results of both our personal, 1-1 interviews with other studios as well as the survey we sent out to a variety of national projects. The first key insight we gained from this research was that studios have a problem with recruitment/retention, as many students lack a fundamental understanding about what DFA does, and many students who are part of the organization end up dropping quickly when the workload becomes too much. Secondly, it seems that DFA studios have problems recruiting community partners, as many partners do not know how … Continue reading Team Design Journal: REFRAME

Team Design Journal: IMMERSE

For Immerse, we reached out to different studios and had them fill out a survey. We also all did phone interviews with studio leadership and asked them a series of questions about their studios. If we create a design journal that includes many DFA studios, all the studios are stakeholders (our super-stakeholders could be the studio leads).   “Design thinking is a principle of understanding human needs.” -Jason Charles   We realized that pain points of the studio come in many different flavors: Studios have problem with recruitment / retention People outside of DFA don’t know what DFA is / … Continue reading Team Design Journal: IMMERSE

Team Design Journal:IDENTIFY

Welcome to Team DFA Design Journal’s first update! As our team name implies, our project this semester will entail working on birthing a DFA Design Journal. Why? There is not yet a standardized way for DFA studios to share their projects (buzzwords: cross-communicate and cross-pollinate). Our users are DFAers and we assume their day-to-day involves DFA. By increasing reference to works that’s being done/has been done we have the potential to significantly impact their lives. We have found that our project differs from other typical Rice DFA projects, in that we kinda have our solution already. So our first pivot … Continue reading Team Design Journal:IDENTIFY