We entered into our fourth Sprint this past Monday. We’ve gone down the rabbit hole and into the wilds of Sprint Planning, interviewing, researching, a user-testing workshop, meeting with Oost Online and improving our visual design with brainstorming sessions. This Sprint is gon’ be epic.
Orlando and Atossa’s brainstorming faces. And hand-waving gestures.
To start off the week, we sat down with Gijs to ideate and plan for this Sprint. We’ve gotten to be pros at this part of the process (it used to take us days to brainstorm, and now we’re good to go in a matter of hours), and we created a load of user stories that basically build upon user stories from our previous sprint (a.k.a – on a basic level – adding colour and text to our visual design work).
Fieldwork in Oost – just look at all of those doors to bang down.
Atossa and Shreya have been interviewing the residents of Oost left, right and center so that we can incorporate more personal stories into the visuals of our project (somehow…). Atossa came up with the idea to knock on doors to talk to people instead of bombarding them with questions on the street. Call it a genius plan, call it slightly stalkerish, but the girl managed to get 24 interviews in the span of a single evening. Hey, if it works…
Model of Engagement, Interactive Screen style.
Atossa has also been delving further into research about engagement so that we can readapt the pyramid of engagement (see a few blog posts back) to better suit our project. We want to understand engagement in quantitative terms, so that we can actually measure the effectiveness of our work. Side note: Atossa gets oh-so very excited about research. It is heartwarming to the max.
The Chocohashtag – Work from Jochen.
On Wednesday we had a user-testing workshop with Jochen Riester. Beyond fits of laughter (after learning about certain projects like the Chocohashtag and the Bierkini), we gained some really valuable insights about different types of research (exploratory, descriptive and causal) and the difference between qualitative and quantitative research (read: numbers matter). Jochen suggested that we get help figuring out certain visualizations by actually asking our users – or kids, because kids just get things – to draw out different icons.
Roughin’ it out: Technical flow of things.
On the technical side of things, Nikhil and Shreya have been working to create a technical flowchart so that our audience (and um, some of our team members, maybe) can actually understand how we are translating our data into visuals. Super important. Orlando has also been looking at making sense of RSS Feeds (aka Rich Site Summaries or web feed formats that publish frequently updates information like blog entries or twitter feeds or news headlines), as we want the information on our screens to constantly update (as more tweets or other types of stories get fed into our data streams).
Orlando mapping out Oost, pre-meeting.
On Thursay Atossa and Orlando met Willemijn Hendriks and Jeroen Groenewegen, participants in the Skyscrapers program. The Skyscrapers program is currently working on Oost Online, a website that updates the public about the general goings-on in Oost. They want the website to include content that younger people will be interested in. So… we discussed the possibility of a collaboration, in the form of an article about our project to go on their website, and the content of their website to go into the visual output of our project. It’s really exciting and we’ll keep you updated to how it all goes down. #happydance
Design all day, e’ry day.
We also had a mini-brainstorming session where we started thinking about the different types of stories we are incorporating into our project (so far, tweets, news stories and personal narratives) and how they can translate on a visual level. Ultimately, we’ve realized that we need to do a lot of text-based experimentation with our users in order to understand if our ideas are coming across (cue: exciting music). Lisanne has been working on creating different variations of the design – from different screen sizes, to different colour palettes, to typographic play – so that we can test over and over. And over.
Orlando gets ready for Kingsday, or something…
With all of the testing we want to do next week, a few of us may or may not be putting in some extra hours this weekend. But starting Sunday evening, our laptops will be closed and all of the orange will be worn. Happy Kingsnight & Kingsday to one and all!