Week 9

Week 9 was interesting week in development as it was the week immediately after a new design solution was proposed.  This meant that my primary job this week was selling the idea, to both Kyle, Hamish and the tutors and lecturers.  Thankfully the idea is a good one so that wasn't too difficult of a job.

We managed to catch up with Kyle on Tuesday morning before other classes we had.  In this brief time we managed to bring him around to the idea and he managed to contribute a few ideas of his own.  The most important of these ideas was grouping the questions/scenarios we present to the user into categories which would be calculated in order to give feedback on each category.  For example three fitness questions could be calculated together to generate an overall fitness score which would be used to give the user feedback.  We also brought up the idea of visualising the data we received.

In the Wednesday class we presented the idea to the tutors and lecturers in the class and it was well received by all, being a significant improvement on our previous ideas.  We also took the opportunity to plan our next few moves as a group, asking what research we'd like to do and how we'd like to present our UI.  We also began to design the questions for the new product.

During the class Kyle also showed off how his software for getting weight from a Wii balance board was working.  It was important that he had reached this stage as he is away for the whole of the university break with The University Games in Queensland, playing basketball.  That was all working well which is great, Kyle has been doing good work with the programming side of things and hopefully should be able to make the IR sensor function properly too once he's given access to one.


On Friday Max and I got together to do some research on the problem.  First up max did a heuristic analysis of the problem using Jakob Nielson's ten usability heuristics.  This revealed many things, including the fact that, for our system, we'd have to break some the usability heuristics, such as the visibility of system status because if the user figured out what the information was getting at then they may try and game the system, skewing the results.  Overall however the system revealed many interesting things.

I did some research on the actual question design, getting some valuable information on how to write the actual questions and how to design them such as in games (including the walking dead and Bioshock) in order to entertain as well as gather information.  Looking into the psychology of the person being questioned is very interesting and revealed things like the fact that players will make a decision based on what they think other players would make.
After that Max did research on UI design and cognitive bias.  Both of these areas will help us design our questions in a way which is well presented and makes our best attempt to avoid any bias to the questions the user would experience, ensuring that we get the most accurate responses possible, increasing the overall quality of our project.  While he was doing that I was working on research about alternative health threats, which I found primarily came under the heading of "stress", which encompassed lack of sleep and working too much, without getting enough down time.

With our research nearly complete I'm hoping that the next week will primarily be about development of the idea, getting the project to a stage where our work is presentable next week.  This will be a big challenge but I plan on keeping the project scope for the time being manageable and focused, just getting what we can get done and worrying about all the bells and whistles after our initial presentation.

Week 8

Week 8 was a week of change, with our original idea being thrown out.  The week started off well with Kyle telling the rest of the group that he was progressing well with his work to get the Wii fit balance board working to measure weight.  Then came Wednesday.  I was, unfortunately, struck by food poisoning and was unable to attend the first half of the day.  In this time Max and Hamish had decided that our original idea was too boring and generic and, with help from the tutors, had decided to take it in a new direction.

Once I’d come into class I was informed of a few things, firstly that we should use an IR sensor rather than a Kinect and secondly that we needed to redesign our idea.  I was happy with both of these suggestions because I had been feeling like the idea had been getting pretty stale, too.  Because Rob had responded so well to the idea of insulting people by calling them fat we decided that we could harness this idea for our system.  Max and Hamish had also talked to the tutors and they had suggested taking a more “adult” approach to talking with adults and we thought that this was the way to do that.

We brainstormed in that class on ways to achieve this, throwing out ideas like an app that throws out random insults about your physical health.  We developed these ideas until we came to the idea of having a syntax for sentences that could be insults or compliments, depending, so changing a couple of the words in the sentence based on a person’s current weight and performance.  For example the sentence “You’re fat and don’t do enough exercise” could be easily turned into “You’re fat but you do enough exercise”.

We then talked to Somwrita who was very interested in the idea of customising feedback for the user; we talked about generative advertising and promotion in order to get people involved in their own health.  In this time we’d moved more away from the insulting factor to the customisation that we had found in our brainstorming surrounding it.

After our meeting I set up our next few steps, which were: Talking to Kyle about the idea, as he had been unable to attend and workshopping our idea until we managed to figure out exactly what form our solution would take.  To this effect Max and I agreed to meet on the Sunday of the week in order to work together on the problem, brainstorming possible solutions.

After this I summarised the Health literacy as a public health goal paper I had been planning on summarising the week before.

On the Sunday Max and I were thankfully able to get through a huge amount of work.  We realised that our system in its original form was still interesting, just the first stage of the whole process, that is the obtaining of information from the user, was boring and undeveloped.  In order to remedy this we threw out a huge range of solutions to this problem.

The main theme of our ideas, which interested Max and I greatly, was choose your own adventure games.  These ideas took several forms including getting given a character based on their height and weight then when you try to make it the character you want it tells you how to get fit, story where, in order to beat the dragon you have to go for runs, eat healthily etc. (in game clicking button) bad choices could even have short term benefits with long term consequences., General story where the user makes choices and the win or fail based on these choices then feedback is given.

The point of all of this was to a. get information from the user on how they lived their lives and to b. give them feedback on this information, pulling through the customisation stream we decided to follow earlier.  The user’s feedback would be customised to their own lifestyle in order to give them advice they could actually act on.

What we ended the day on was that the input to the set up would be “A choose your own adventure game which using choices between easy with short term benefits and hard with long term ones highlights health issues as well as getting information from the user in order to highlight their own person potential health issues. We can extend this by using the data gained in the game create visualisations etc.  Not all choices are black and white and we could highlight this.”

We then organised to meet Kyle on Tuesday morning in order to get his feedback on the idea as Hamish was away until Wednesday on a sailing Regatta (which he, again, won).  That all went well but I’ll cover that in next week’s blog post.

Overall we’re heading in a much better direction at the end of this week.   Hopefully we can really realise our ideas in the next week and pull it all together, with the approval of the whole group.

Week 7

Week 7 was a bit of a slow week project wise.  Everyone has several other assessments coming up combined with the fact that we are at a time period in which research is the main thing we can actually do with this project.  Everyone was working on the tasks assigned to them last week and there was some stuff being posted on Facebook page, a few pieces of research from each of the group mates.  Thankfully it seems that we're narrowing down on the technical aspects of the project, Kyle, after running in to lots of trouble with scales sending their data to a computer, has found out that Wii balance boards are able to communicate weight to a computer much more easily.  Thankfully my girlfriend has a Wii balance board that we'll be able to use.  It's nice to have that aspect of the project more or less dealt with.

Personally I've been getting into the advertising research heavily, looking at a range of scholarly articles about advertising, particularly in the health field.  These are sources of really great information and help highlight how relevant that advertising would be to our solution.  I think it’s important we design a comprehensive advertising strategy for our solution as this will make our design really viable and interesting.  Health advertising is interesting as there is only one really well documented and back up strategy, scare tactics.  The only real way to force people make a change in their own lives is to make them afraid of the consequences of continuing on their bad habits.

I also found an article about improving general health literacy which I haven’t actually got to completely analysing and breaking it down to figure out what parts are particularly helpful to us.  However this article is talking about the wider problem and has serious implications on our main idea, suggesting ways in which we can use the design to improve people’s own health literacy and therefore make a real change in their lives.

I also had the realisation this week that, at least in terms of privacy, our design was very much like an ATM.  This means that our original idea of having a fully enclosed booth was probably an excessive measure, ATMs have to be completely private and only require an enclave in the wall.  Max quickly took this idea and found the industry standards for ATMs which we need to look into further ( http://www.bankers.asn.au/Industry-Standards/ABAs-Accessibility-of-Electronic-Banking-/ATM-Standard).

Going into the next week my personal plan is to thoroughly analyse that article as soon as possible.  As far as the group is concerned I think we need to have a proper sit down and talk on Wednesday about where we’re going and divvying up the tasks that are required to get there.  The challenge for me, personally, is stepping up and making sure we get this organised, whether I feel like doing it or not.  Last week I was a bit apathetic in the class and didn’t properly make sure we were on track.  We’ve run out of time for me to be unmotivated and I now have to make sure I’m on the ball and keeping on top of the situation.

Week 6

Week 6 has been one of the group’s quietest weeks so far.  The whole team deserved a bit of a break after the excellent work they all did with the presentation.  Max decided to take his break to the next level by going to Italy, an impressive effort from him proving once again why he’s such a valuable group member, he really goes above and beyond.

The group was recovering and reassessing our position after the presentations, making sure that we knew where we were and what we were doing before we made our next move.  There was some discussion on the group’s Facebook about how we would address the issue with user groups, our original ones failing to inspire our creative process.  However this didn’t really lead anywhere and was more or less abandoned at the beginning of the week.

All in all very little was done until Wednesday, I failed to push for more work to be done as I was, as most members of the group were, focusing a bit more on my other studies and, to be perfectly honest, at a bit of a loss on where to go from there and how to solve the problems that faced the group.  For that reason I allowed the discussions to slide until our class on Wednesday where we could talk in person and hopefully come to a good solution that would suit the group and design problem better.

Unfortunately on Wednesday Kyle was unable to make it to class which meant it was just Hamish and I.  Fortunately this didn’t really matter as most of our problems were solved when we got feedback on our presentations.  As far as communication and research quality went the results were extremely positive which is great, I stressed to the group he importance of these two marking criteria, encouraging the use of research throughout the presentation and the use of images etc to help better communicate our ideas, and the group all responded well to this, finding and creating images and managing to cite a wide range of reliable sources.

On the other side, however, the other two marking criteria, concept and development quality and technical and creative proficiency and solution quality weren’t quite as strong.  Unfortunately I’m still not aware of how well we did in these areas but hopefully it isn’t too bad and doesn’t bring us down from our outstanding effort on the first half.  I feel a great deal of personal responsibility for this discrepancy in our marks. 

I didn’t push these marking criteria as hard as I did the others, I managed to tunnel vision on the communication and research quality.  This is partially because I, wrongly, perceived these to mostly be out of my hands since I wasn’t directly involved with these aspects.  In hindsight I had a lot of say in these areas since I was able to review them and work with the appropriate team member to make sure that the criteria was met.

One of the key problems with our initial presentation is that we didn’t make our actual idea clear enough.  I’m not sure quite why there was this misunderstanding but I think it was partially a failure on our part to put enough emphasis on our final idea and explain it properly. Once I’d suggested that the testing system could be leveraged in Centrelink offices and hospitals etc (an idea I suggested briefly in the group but failed to properly expand upon) the idea seemed to gain a lot more traction.

The upside of this whole process is that we are able to follow through with our original core idea.  This core idea is also able to be augmented with the addition of advertising which was another of our ideas which went over very well with the markers.

On Thursday, after reflecting on where we were going after getting feedback, and making an attempt to break down our next steps, I assigned tasks to the group members, in order to get them moving on and working on something worthwhile.

To Hamish, our industrial designer, I assigned the task of doing some research into how we are going to do the physical aspects of this project. To Max (and he won’t have much time for this as he only gets back today (Sunday)) I assigned the task of looking into potential UI designs for the final set up.  For Kyle, and I discussed this with him on Thursday, we agreed he do technical research, figuring out what components we’d need for him to program the final product.

As for myself, I’m working on the advertising side of the project, assessing the viability of designing tie-in adverts and seeing the best ways of communicating health information.  I’ve been looking at several scholarly articles and books about how to advertise effectively, particularly health information and it looks like there is a lot we could do that would work well with the rest of the design.

Hopefully next week the whole team gets into gear as we will all be back in Sydney and working on the project.

Week 5

This week was a packed one with lots of work to do for all members of the group, especially with Hamish returning from his sailing regatta on a high (and possibly slightly fatigued) from his win at the event. We were all working on our concept and presentation in order to get it to be the best we could for Wednesday. 

Hamish immediately asked to be filled in on where we were and to be given something to do so I told him where we were at and asked him to start working on the user profiles, a solid grounding with these would ensure our design was as effective as possible so it was really great to have Hamish putting all of his effort into getting that right.

Meanwhile Kyle was working on Design problem, making sure we were thorough with our research and had really made sure knew what we were dealing with.  Kyle managed to find some great stats and additional information which meant we put together a well-rounded design problem that looked at the problem accurately and in detail.

Max was working on the actual design solutions and did an excellent job at it, especially considering he was wrapping up lots of other work and packing before his trip to Italy, shortly after we presented.  Max really went the extra mile with the ideas, making sure they were well rounded and well thought out, putting in the extra time to make sure they were polished and included sketches to illustrate the points we were putting across.

One of our design solutions, a poster

I was working on the introduction and trying to help out on the other sections, especially making sure they hit the marking criteria. It was a bit of a struggle for us in some parts to include research as well as much as I was pushing for but the team really responded and I think we managed to work together hit not only that but all of the marking criteria, leading to a solid presentation.  My only real regret is that at the more intensive moments of the creation of the presentation I was at work so wasn’t able to contribute quite as much as I might have liked.  That being said it was probably for the best as it allowed each team member to do their own work without my (well intentioned) interference.

Once we had finished the presentation, which, I will admit, went to the last minute rather, despite us doing the bulk of the work well before the due date, we did the actual presentation.  Overall I believe this presentation went well.  I was more nervous speaking than I expected to be which was frustrated and unfortunately led to me rambling slightly part way through my part which resulted in Max, who was suffering from his own nerves, to move the presentation along.  While this was slightly frustrating, since I had not quite prefaced what each team member had contributed to the assignment, it did in fact let the whole presentation flow better as we got into the important information far faster than we would have otherwise, the information I would have covered is hopefully covered fully in this blog.

A design solution featuring a game which is effected by the user's BMI

The feedback we got for our ideas was mostly positive, the key part being that we needed to hone in on our chosen user group(s) to ensure we had the freedom to come up with a fun and dynamic design.  We also really need to hammer down and workshop the concept.

After the presentation we had to finish our write up of the report.  Fortunately for Kyle and I who were assembling it most of the notes on the actual presentation were comprehensive and well written which meant we could just use them with a few modifications to ensure the flow of the piece.  This meant that the report was both easy to write and true as possible to the presentation.  Unfortunately we had to cut some parts due to the 1000 word limit however all the important parts were maintained.

Another Poster concept

The last task I set to this week was getting the user group sorted out.  With Max gone this task is up to Kyle, Hamish and I.  Kyle suggested younger teenagers/children with the theory that preventing bad health at this age would help prevent a lot of the accumulative costs and burdens of bad health.  Hamish also added that this would allow us to make the idea more interesting and fun.  I agreed with them at the time and thought that it was a great idea however I have since realised that targeting this group could have some serious ethical and legal hurdles which could actually prove to constrain the design rather than give it freedom.  Working with children is obviously tightly controlled and is probably something we want to avoid at this point.

Unfortunately the falling through of that idea means that we don’t really have a core user group at the moment.   This coming week we’re going to do even more work on that particular problem and hopefully we can all put our heads together and work out exactly what we want to do.  I’m really keen to get the team working on the actual problem but getting a great user group at this idea could mean the difference between a good and great design so is worthy of solid thought.

Week 4

As we rolled into the fourth week of semester our group was really getting into gear and beginning to engage the problem on a deeper level.  We were somewhat hindered by the absence of Hamish, he was off at a sailing event and because of this was unable to contribute as much as he doubtlessly would have otherwise.  While Hamish's input is extremely valuable to all group work we were happy to continue on without him for the time being especially since he was afforded such an exciting opportunity.  So this week it was primarily the three of us, Max, Kyle and I, working on the project, bringing our concept and research to a presentable level.

As we had done the bulk of our research last week we were able to move into the other parts of the project.  First up I identified some of the groups in the community who suffer from health inequalities.  I did this so we could see which groups really needed our help and focus on these individuals.  Obviously we are not limited to these groups, as health issues are common within the wider Australian population, no one group has particularly lower rates of them.

Although we had wrapped up most of our research I managed to find an article about designing social problem-solving interventions.  This article was summarised by Max and should prove to be very useful in our efforts to help people with health issues.

We then got to the Wednesday class, which is often our main opportunity to really nut out the problem.  In that class we managed to figure out a range of things.  Primarily we figured out that we would do an exhibition type fixed set up as this avoided the over-saturated markets of apps and products that are common in the health sphere as well as allowing cheap and easy access to people with limited resources.  Obviously there are issues with how to fund it etc but we figured there were multiple avenues on how to approach that particular issue so we’d sort that out once we’d refined the design a bit more.

In the class we also brainstormed aspects such as what we could record in the proposed set up as well as who would be affected by the system.  After the class I broke down what we’d need to do for the rest of the week, primarily nailing down the user profiles and sorting out our ideas, as we’d pretty much covered everything else.

At the end of this week we have a fair few things that need to be sorted for the presentation on Wednesday but I believe we’ll be able to sort out everything by Monday night as we should be in a good place come Wednesday, particularly with the return of Hamish.  Unfortunately on Wednesday we lose max, who is visiting Italy for his sister’s wedding, however hopefully with his involvement in the ideation phase we can avoid most of the negative effects of having him missing.

Week 3

So this is my first blog post, which is appropriate given that this weeks the week (and some of the previous week) we've done the most work on our project, the previous few weeks were more getting our group together and working out what we actually needed to do with this assignment.  With that out of the way we were able to work on our idea.

We started by having a group discussion on what topic we'd like to focus on for our final work.  We did this by writing down the topics in a list and going through them one by one, each stating our own opinions on them and crossing off the ones which were unanimously voted against.  We went through this process several times until we had narrowed it down our topic to demographics and narrowed that down further to the aging population problem in Australia.

This topic, through constant back and forth between the team members, morphed further into the wider health issue affecting the Australian population and it's implications on the health system and the impact on Australia as a whole.  We discussed several ideas, Max and Kyle particularly coming up with a few ideas, particularly the idea of having a tool which users could assess their own health easily and find simple solutions to the problem.  All team members helped flesh out these ideas, their unique experiences helping shape them into more interesting and sophisticated products than they were initially.

After this point we started discussing which roles each group member would have, we had originally designed the group with four members in order to have a good balance of skills, without much doubling up or wasted talents.  Because of this the task of assigning particular roles was a relatively simple one.  Kyle, being the strongest and most passionate technical member will be responsible for the bulk of the coding.  Max, with his strong artistic skills and flair for all things aesthetic will be responsible for the visuals of the final design.   Hamish, with his experience with the Sydney Uni racing team and his nimble fingers, will be responsible for the physical side of the project.  My role in the group is more of an organisational one, making sure the other members of the group know what they are doing and are on track, keeping them motivated and giving feedback on their work.

We’ve decided for the next few days that we’d like to focus on researching the issue and possible solutions to it, so we can having a solid grounding for our project.  Ideally I’d like to have the group finished with presentation by the end of next weekend in order to ensure that we have some time to practice the presentation and iron out any kinks that may present themselves.  In order to facilitate this I’ve broken down the material we’ve been given related to it in order to simplify it and allow all group members to know exactly what we needed to do.

I’ve also requested that all group members make weekly blog posts, making sure we keep an accurate and detailed record of the whole project.  I think this project will turn out well, it’s certainly off to a promising start.  Plus they let me be bossy.  I’m into that.