the end is just the beginning

so...we have come to the end of the class...all of us are busy writing our papers and other things... but this project is not over yet, since courtney has offered us an internship to really do this project just for them...we think most of us will continue working on our project to gain valuable experiences for our future career!

Thx for your hard work, team!

-Edmond

Update 6/4/2007

So this week we have started working on our Final Presentation, which is on Tuesday. The slides are pretty much done, but there are just a few bumps that needs to be hammered down and more detail on some of the slides need to be added. We met over the weekend at Cafe Ventanas to work on the presentation, but unfortunate to say, we actually didn't work that much on the presentation as much as we hoped. Oh wait... we met on Friday, too! At the Price Center theater. Despite the crazy beer garden and rock bands playing outside, I think we got a lot done on Friday than we did on Saturday. We mostly edited the slides and added more detail.

On Saturday, it was basically just more of the same thing plus we added some more pictures of the things we did.

For Monday, all the slides and pictures should be done editted and we should be able to start doing a practice run through of our presentation. I suppose the easiest way is to just divide the slides up... since we have 20 slides, each of us do 5 slides and spend about 1 minute on each. I think we just need to be careful about pacing ourselves and getting the right point across and not dwell too much into details of something that may not be too important.....

So yah, week 10! Here we go...

-Ray

last words?! o_O"

The project is coming to an end. finally! Lol. I am happy that we have somewhat an accomplishment on the project. Final presentation is on tuesday...wow. I just felt that time really flies. I got to know my team members so much, from a totally stranger to good friends that i can share stories with. That is definitely one of the biggest rewards i received from doing the project other than learning the process of doing a customer-centered design. I think a following up class with 102c will be a good idea. i really enjoy doing customer-centered design. from this class, i found out that i want to be an user experience designer.

-Mandy

THE END IS NEAR

is pretty unlucky that our presentation is on Tuesday, otherwise we can meet Courtney again to gather more information and further improve our prototype. Today, we decided to focus on doing our final presentation slides. We pretty much went over a brief overview of what we have done for the class, from interviewing to prototyping. Tomorrow we will meet for the last time in class with the TAs and IAs, hopefully we will get some useful advice from them at this point. This weekend we will meet again and arrange for the final presentation.

wish us luck...fish..
Edmond

Week 8

Sorry I did not update Sunday... it was memorial holiday weekend without access to a computer. I had not expected to be away from civilization and without Internet access. Anyway.....I felt that our week 8 was riddled with problems... at least of my own when my car broke down and then my mom's car breaking down days later. It was a struggle for me to get transportation as I was bumming rides off of people and borrowing my cousin's car. At the end, I managed to have a car to drive everyone down to Mission Bay to meet at the SDOF office!Also due to transportation problems, I was unable to make it to the group's weekly Wednesday meeting. First I left my parking permit in my cousin's car so I was forced to use metered parkings for classes on Wednesday. Second, I had to go pick up my mom from work, which also happened to be the same time during our group meeting.However, we decided to meet on Friday to work a bit more on our models/interpretations/affinity diagram. We got a good table at the lounge of the Price Center theater, and I brought post-it notes for everyone to use for our Affinity Diagram. It turned out good I guess....We weren't able to meet during Memorial Day weekend, as I'm sure everyone already had plans for the holiday -- because I know I did! Unfortunately we were also not able to prepare anything new for our Tuesday meeting with Courtney at the SDOF office, so i'm not sure that's going to take place because just getting there and twirling our thumbs at the table isn't going to be a wise use of our time. There really isn't much more to do other than concentrating on refining our prototype this week and then making our final final prototype in digital format of some sort and make slides for our presentation week 10.So that is what we're doing this week! Refining our prototype and preparing presentation slides. This might come off wierd, but I have recently installed Microsoft Office 2007 on my laptop and I really really really really want to make use of PowerPoint 2007! I'm kind of excited to use it actually....
R.F.

reflections..

The meeting down at the SDOF HQ in the bay went well and we received good feedback on the paper prototypes I drew. We came to conclusion on the functionality, structure and HCI related issues. From my perspective we now have a fundamental understanding of their educational process and have reached a good understanding of the difficulties involved with fish identification (more complex than one would think) The next step would be to further refine the prototype and move onto a digital format while trying to create "dummy" functionality or implementation (I'll see what I can do with the few spare hours on my sched., it would break my heart not to do any implementation at all. Like spending hours on cooking and never getting to eat..) We also need to take the time to organize the material for our internal use. Everyone needs to have access to the same notes and data for the upcoming paper.

I suggest we put into the documentation/paper things that we learned that could be useful while implementing and not only cover the Contextual Design process. I feel an obligation to create value for the organization since they have put in the time to meet us on several occasions. Lets meet and figure out how to finalize and plan the remaining activities, there is still more things to do..

Hope everyone had a chance to catch their breath during the long weekend..

Over and out,
Martin 00:16 @ CSE labs.

thoughts

9th week is here. we finished the affinity diagram. I think everybody had a good understand of the project and the problem of the project, as well as cultural issues that related to the project. coming up with the affinity diagram isn't easy at all. because all of us have different way of phrasing our notes, the time took to write down the notes on post-its was longer especially we explained every note clearly before we write it down on post-its which that made sure we're all on the same page. after we had all the post-its. the problem was putting all the similar ideas together. i think the hardest part was not putting similar ideas together. it was the part when we have to come up with a sentence to describe or best fit those similar ideas. that took us a while. meanwhile, i learned that our team was united because we were working together as a group. i am thankful to have everyone of the members in the team.

-Mandy

this week.....

the interview this week went really well. There were only two users came to our interveiw this time and thus, we had a much better control of the situation this time. We had better understanding of what we should implement into the online quiz and the information page based on our interviewees. Since all five of us were there, we have gained a share understanding of the users' information.

This friday we have also started and finished the affinity diagram. And hopefully next week we will have a working prototype to show the users and see if there is anything we could change to make our design better.

edmond

pics

meeting with the volunteer divers




few of the projects and activities SDOF hosts












-Mandy =]

reflection

Monday, we'll meet to talk about questions that we should ask on tuesday after we show the divers our vision on the project. from last time's experience, we should only interview three people this time. last time, the situation was totally out of control with five divers.

as of now, i feel that we have most of the data. we need to start putting everything together in a larger picture. i think this is the most difficult part of the project, be able to pick out useful data and not to leave out too much of the details.

-Mandy

This would be kind of a second update for the week, so it's going to be shorter!

We had an interview with the divers for SDOF this week, and we are just so greatful that Courtney is so incredibly helpful in our project. It was probably quite an effort for her to put together an interview for 5 divers and us to meet at the same time of the day on a weekday.

All the participants were very informative about what they had to say. Unfortunately it also often diverged from the issue at hand (the question i asked them). Since we only had a limited amount of time of about an hour for all 5 divers, we had to do it all the same time which made it a bit complicated and frustrating to manage. I think just because of the way it was set up, that is, with the 5 divers and my group sitting at one table in a "conference center" building, everyone just kind of had an idea that it was a conference/meeting rather than a contextual inquiry kind of thing.

I just felt at times that we lost control of the interview session as the divers began to collaborate among themselves of the ideas for our project. I wanted to intervene, but at the same time I didn't know what I could say to steer it back under our control without sounding like a complete anus.

Next time (if there ever is one!), we will DEFINATELY need to do our interviews one at a time. Maybe 2 people will be ok, but 5 people was just incredibly difficult to manage.

We then had an interpretation session Wednesday during our usual group meeting to compare notes and plan for Saturday and next week.

For next week, we are going to hopefully come up with a prototype/storyboard because we are meeting with the divers again on Tuesday. I'm not sure how many divers are going to be there, but hopefully just one or 2 of the divers we interviewed last tuesday.

recap for the interview

although we didnt do a really good job during the interview on tuesday, i think we more or less get a sense of what kind of features we need to focus on for our design.


important elements for designing the online quiz (roughly):

1) showing multiple pictures (video would be better) for any particular species in order to prevent users from memorizing a specific pictures unconsciously. Presenting multiple photos forces users to focus on the features and detail of the fish instead of what is in the picture. The series of pictures should also include pictures of the same kind of fish under different lighting (dark or bright) and different gender (male or female, because some species’ shape, size and color vary greatly for different sex). Since the reef only deals with adult fish, for now we don’t have to worry about the youngster fish.

2) be cautious with NAMING, common names are often representing MORE than one kind of fish

3) Format of inputting the answer should NOT be simple multiple choice test, but a fill-in-the blank type, since the users wont get MC questions under the sea when they see a particular species. Spelling however, could be ignored since divers wont be require to spell s.t. out underwater; thus, the self-quiz system shouldn’t require the user to spell. One possible solution is to include an “interactive spelling reminder system” so that the user won’t be required to spell the word out when they input their answers.

4) NO LOGIN; since we have limited time, we would not provide the users a unique user account for this system. Rather, we would focus on building a UNIVERSAL system that would fit most users.

5) The system would generate specific species of fish according to the level the user is in, (tentative, will make decision after consolidating) for instance, common species of fish would generate more often if the user wants to be tested on a lower level scale.


I don’t know if these helps… anyways, i m going to sleep...thanks for reading…

-Edmond

Tentative schedule

oki, let's talk about our schedules, since time is running out.

Week 7
Wed (5/16) meeting at 5p Cafe Roma.
= more models
= affinity diagram
Sat (5/19) SDOF training session from 9a-3p
= since it lasts for 6 hours, and Courtney said that only first part of the training is important to us. let's go to the first half the session, then we'll spend sometimes to discuss what needs to be done that includes the final paper.
= consolidate gathered data we interview from last week and also today
= talk about vision

Week 8
Mon (5/21) meet to come up with storyboard, maybe prototype if we have time
Tue (5/22) (bring storyboard, maybe prototype too) meet with volunteers at SDOF
Wed (5/23)group meeting
= talk about the meeting on tues(5/22)
= brain storming the final paper
= start gathering stuff for the final presentation
will meet during weekends if needed

Week 9
Wed (5/30) regular meeting
= work on final paper and presentation
= prototyping

Week 10
hopefully we'll be done by this point.

fill free to comment/input on anything i miss here

====================================================
yes, today's presentation wasnt well prepared, maybe we can work on the final presentation better. Raymond has a good point.

WE CAN DO IT! LET'S WORK HARDER ON THIS PROJECT!! GO TEAM WORK! =]

-Mandy

Update of current thoughts

I feel like the presentation we had was not concrete enough. I mean, we have collected a lot of data, and will continue to collect more data... but I guess I'm just going to be honest in acknowledging that we did in fact kind of put together our presentation late and were not very prepared in organizing everything that we said and everything that we were supposed to say. It wasn't until after I sat down at my seat that it dawned on me that I didn't talk about some of the other specifics during our interview... like the book by Paul Humann that the divers use as a Bible for reference of information on fish species.

Or how I should have briefly mentioned how the divers train for the REEF test, like basically looking at the pictures that they have taken while underwater and then using those pictures to look it up in THE book (Paul Humann's book that is).

Our presentation in bulk was a lot about what SDOF is and how it works, which is important to understanding how the organization works so that we know the context of what our project is trying to do... which is enhancing how the organization present information for its members/volunteers/divers and help train and quiz them to pass the REEF test that they all have to take.

We also forgot to present about the structure of the tests they have to take... like the multiple levels that the divers achieve. E.G., Herb is a level 4 diver... which means he successfully identified at least 100 species in a test based on just the presentation picture of the species and then correctly writing out the name... which is another important aspect of data... is that how the divers take their test! They are shown an overhead/projector picture of a type of fish species or any other marine animal, and they have to write down the name.

That particular data of knowing how they take the test provides that we know how to design a system in helping them quiz themselves and train for the test: should we include strict spelling correctness during the quiz... how would multiple choice work without giving too much information away about what species they are looking at? ... stuff like that.

I feel like there was so much more we could have said during our presentation, and the above stated is just a short list of examples of some of the things I forgot to talk about and now wish I talked about... yahh... I really want our final presenation to have more detail and be more comprehensive and that I have practiced and gone over the slides so I don't miss presenting crucial information like today.

I'm not saying that we had a horrible presentation, but just I feel like we could have included a lot more in it than we did.

Ok, i'm done babbling!

-Ray

Summary Week 6

The Saturday meeting down at the SDOF HQ at the bay went well. We managed to get more data in the areas where we were lacking and and kept the conversation topic accordingly. Although the initial meeting was more real-world productive, we now had a chance to reach a deeper understanding on the organization and their domain. There is a major difference in the way a non profit voluntary based organization works compared to one in the commercial sector. First and foremost, people tend to sit on multiple chairs and perform a wide range of duties. The processes that are based on volunteers happens as they do since everyone has to sacrifice their spare time in between job and family. These differences puts our team in a somewhat sticky situation when applying the Contextual Design method. It is, for example, hard for us to observe certain events/processes, when they only take place every second month or so. From my understanding the Contextual Design method works best when you have the opportunity to be on location and observe a role/task/duty that's being performed on a regular (daily) basis. To address this issue we directed questions concerning the different programs, events, sponsors, volunteers, education, public relationship etc.

Unfortunately, there were no volunteers present at the Saturday meeting. We hope to perform a few interview with them on Tuesday. There is a scheduled training session on next Saturday which will be most important for our understanding.

I think for everyone on the team there is a vision and a understanding of what the needs from the PR/HR/management side are. During the upcoming week we will see it all from the volunteers perspective. There has been a few ideas discussed that most certainly will make it to the prototypes.. just have to be careful not to lead them into those or to just collect wish lists. Something we all have learned from..

Additional thoughts,
We need to be more flexible in regards to sharing the workload. Last week generated 22 emails mainly regarding when all of us could get together, the individual schedules are a given fact. Likewise, scheduling appointments with volunteers is hard (Sat. training session is great!)
Maybe it could be more efficient doing the interviews, drawing models, writing the paper etc etc. in pairs or hand out responsibilities. Hopefully we all have some more space now that the midterms are done, but we all know the UC quarter system.. =)) Just a few more weeks guys, lets do it!

/ Martin Tall

5/13/07

This week we finally got some concrete information for building our work models. We have better understanding of how the organization functions. Courtney herself is one of the instructors and “Herb” would work under her and help her answers some more technical questions, he is more like a fish expert. Many of the people that work in the oceans foundation are college and high school interns and volunteers, and most of them directly report to Courtney. She is pretty much the center of the organization. SDFO would not provide any equipment for divers since it is just a program of information and for the divers to summit their data. 50% of SDFO’s incomes are supported by fundraisers, and the rest are covered by donations and grants.
On Tuesday we would interview a couple volunteers to collect all the information require for completing our work models and get a sense of what our prototype should look like.

-Edmond

Update End of Week 6

What we accomplished this week was getting a second interview with Courtney (SDOF project director) . We also rescheduled our meeting to Friday and did more work modeling, refined the flow model in particular and hashed out a culture model.

As for personal accomplishment, I haven't really done anything individually that wasn't a group effort. Unless driving everyone down to Mission Bay is considered an accomplishment?

I thought something that really held us back this far was because we do not have sufficient data and we had to becareful not to start our work without this crucial data. After our interview Saturday, I think we got another chunk of data that will be very useful. We have also obtained a number of artifacts that we could present as data as well as a very very very very very rough mockup of something Courtney drew on the fly. Something kind of simple, but still it encompasses something that can be used in the direction of our project.

For next week, we have scheduled more interviews. This time, with the divers/volunteers and can narrow down onto specific data more pertinent to the scope of our focus. So as soon as this week is over, we should finally be able to start prototyping by the weekend and maybe we'll set up an extra meeting this weekend as well.

I think things have finally gotten the kick-start-ignition and hopefully we don't run into any potholes or speed bumps of the like. The outlook is optimistic... for me at least.

thoughts

I realized that SDOF is a hard project in terms of getting the data. since all the data are coming from interviews of volunteer divers and some other ppl from SDOF, we have a difficult time collect data due to conflicts and inflexibility with divers schedule to meet up. I also thought that the hardest part of the project is not being able to observe and follow divers around to understand their work. with the limited training course SDOF offers every year, we are not able to see their training process due to time constraints.

-Mandy

Update 5/1

Hi guys, so Mandy has kind of come up with some group-imposed deadlines to kind of get a feeling of what our workload is in terms of this quarter for the course.

Including some of my suggestions of course! But overall, a deadline and goal of some sort every week we set should be ideal.

Week 5:
-Set up interviews asap, meet with divers.
-Create models on information available from first meeting with Courtney and Carl

Week 6:
-Interviews continued
-Consolidate, interpret sessions, create models

Week 7:
- Finish up on prototype
-Begin prototyping

Week 8:
-Continue working with prototype (with interviews for feedback?)

Week 9:
-Finishing touches on prototype (meet with Courntey to get final feedbacks?) ---> Final Design
-Begin writing paper
-Getting ready for presentation

Week 10:
-PRESENTATION


So, what do you guys think? Feel free to edit/add! I think this is a good guideline as of now...


Summary of Meeting - April 28th -
-Met at Cafe Ventanas to discuss project layout
Talked about models for our project, the meeting we had with Courtney

-Interface design brainstorms. How we should design our interface to meet the divers' needs, what features to include in the database search. Jessica doodled the "main page" interface --> became a useful spring board, Martin drew a mock-up interface.


-The meeting was really a brianstorming session and attempted to refine more of what we initially wanted our goals to be.


Summary of meeting - May 1st -
Refining our project focus again and talked with the TAs and their ideas. Started preliminary models (hopefully we will get more concrete). Using for sure is the Sequence Model, Culture Model. The other models will become more developed after our interviews (hopefully this week) for next week.




Ok.. I think that's about it. But... if I missed anything, comment and I will edit i guess!

Meeting this Saturday?

Hi guys, the presenation is done and over with. I think it was an ok presentation, but I still can't help feeling that we really should have put in a time line of events like the other groups did. Because then we would look like we know what our goal was and stuff, but that's ok.

Anyhow, we kind of grazed the idea that we should meet this weekend. I suggest Saturday evening or late afternoon. It's about to be week 5... our time is quickly closing to strangle us all! Umm, yah so if we could meet sometime this weekend, whichever day works best... I think we should meet and just start talking about where exactly to start!

-Ray

Tues project presentations

4/24 tues
after the class project presentations, our group had a chance to talk about whether we should change the powerpoint presentation by adding the project scheduling and deadlines. we discussed for a while and came up with the decision that we'll do something about it after today's(4/25) interview with Courtney, that way we'll have the problem defined and know what to do. we also talked about where and when to meet for the interview.

-Mandy

Slide for presentation in class next week

The slides for the presentation for class next week that is due Sun/Mon
is done and can be downloaded here:

http://www.divshare.com/download/442337-9c3

Please reply w/ comments & ideas for additional notes (if any)
(will be incorporated and sent to Prof. Hollan during the weekend)

Have a good one..
/Martin

recaps of the last few days

tues 4/17
Our group met at PC around Aroma. we talked about communication methods within members and an overall general view of the project, like how should we approach the project. we also talked about setting up an interview with Courtney sometimes this week. this meeting lasted for 30 mins.

wed 4/18
it was planned to meet with Courtney around 4:30p, leaving ucsd at 4p. our group met at PC. The meeting canceled due to the assumption that Courtney leaves work at 6pm, but she left early at 5pm. Later, our group met at 5pm inside the PC food court to discuss how the project should go and came up with questions that can help in leading the upcoming interview with Courtney more effective. We went over models in Contextual Design that can be applied to our future interviews. The meeting lasted for an hour and a half.

Thur 4/19
Our group met around CSB after viewing the 2 clips in CBS 003. we talked about the upcoming presentation, things like what kind of information should be included in the slides of our presentation. this meeting lasted f0r 20 mins.

Meeting w/ S.D.O.F

The first meeting with Courtney Gosch (program director) and Carl Robbins (innovator) has been scheduled to Wednesday at 4pm. Suggesting that we leave UCSD at 3:30pm. The Google Calendar has been updated to include this event.

In the future please post messages that can be considered to be public/discussion or relevant to project/process documentation to this blog. It will leave "a trail of artifacts" that we need
further on (ex. comments/replies to this meeting should be posted as comments to this post)

The Google account information for documents, calendar, blog should have reached your inbox, if not, drop me an email.

/Martin

Welcome to the development blog

General information:
This blog is used to post activities related to the interface/system developement of the San Diego Oceans Foundation / Reef project as a part of the Cognitive Engineering (cogs102c) class at UCSD. Stay tuned...

Initial objectives:
This project will include many aspects besides the design of the interface and pure technology. We strive to perfom a complete overhaul of information management process and technology used for the foundation on the REEF project. All the way from how information is collected by an individual and how he/she will transfer and categorize it in a central database that can be further shared by the world. The project will utilize the methods of Contextual Design.

Organization website:
San Diego Oceans Foundation
http://www.sdoceans.org/
The volunteer REEF research project
http://www.sdoceans.org/programs/armp/armp.php

Team members:
Edmond Yee
Jessica Famula
Mandy Wong
Martin Tall
Raymond Fong

Team meetings:
Wednesday 5-7pm at Price center/Cafe Roma