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