Notes to Reading seminar 2 17/10-14 Carl Sténson

After the research phase comes a maybe the most important phase of the project, a phase where the goal is to create as many ideas as possible and forget the constraints of the project. Many times when I’m part of projects we always tend to take a solution based on technology. When reading these chapters I see the many weak points in a solution like this. First of all the solution usually is very common to an already existing one and secondly it can be a bit too complex for the user to use. In the future and during this project we have/ will try to stay open minded for a longer time and work with more than one solution for a longer time.

One thing I think could have improved our ideation process is if we had tried to forget about our constraints a bit more. Our Brainstorming resulted in ideas that pretty much all of them was doable. If we had allowed ourselves to “go wild” without any constraints I believe we could have come up with other concepts. Because even if the ideas are crazy it is possible to find interesting angles and points that you can apply to another idea.

Another thing I reflected on when reading the chapters is that we have focused very much attention on an interactive screen and where to place it. I think we should widen our focus just a bit to see what is around the screen we could/will be able to create a service that fits better into the context. A screen needs to be supported with a nice station to make the screen visible, attractive and maybe even complimentary information/instructions. A discussion might result in something that could improve our solution.

In the future of our project we will develop a prototype and therefore the chapters about prototyping, testing and development were very interesting to read. I saw many opportunities for us to test our project before actually going to tom tits and try it on real customers. First of all we should try to make an easy-prototype and try different scenarios/role play on them and see what works and what can be refined. And during this process of continued testing I think we can develop a more and more high-fidelity prototype. To work with role play will also help us to keep our first and secondary personas in mind during our work.

How do you think we can make our testing most efficent? (with respect to our context, and constraints)