The. Last. Sprint. It’s happening. Now. It’s mind-boggling, natuurlijk, but we haven’t had anytime to process that #theendisnear. It’s been a busy week: Sprint planning with Gijs, splitting up tasks in order to be super-duper efficient and having group meetings to make key decisions for our final product.
Sprint planning, such fun.
On Monday we had our Sprint planning with Gijs. It was an intense meeting, which mainly involved us trying to simplify (and not complexify, as tends to happen over and over again) our idea. It was tough, but we managed to work out a solution that we’re going to roll with right until the end. Instead of using the time of day and the weather to change or enhance certain moods of our users, we’ve decided that these elements will simply work as trigger points for certain videos or hooks. Rather, we’ve divided our hooks into different categories that relate to a certain type of engagement that we want our users to experience (for example: we hope that our humourous category will invoke laughter). In this way, we have a more direct (and not to mention, measurable) way to have an impact no our users. Oh yeah.
Dividing up landmarks. Hooks. Everything.
After all of the craziness of sorting our ideas, we divided tasks: Atossa and Orlando on the research poster/paper, Nikhil working to get all of our back end modules into place and Lisanne and Shreya sorting out hooks, demos and other design elements.
Flashback: What our researchers actually do together.
Atossa and Orlando have made amazing progress on both the research poster/paper: they’ve got most of the poster filled in and already have gotten notes from Gijs from the first draft. They’ve got another meeting coming up with Gijs (and Marco, exciting) so that they can edit it into the brilliant piece of work that we know they will. Nikhil has been working with Tamara to sort the Twitter module, the “pipeline” for the Sound and Vision footage and just, you know, all of that other technical lah-dee-dah that impresses and confuses the rest of us. He says that different parts are “done” and we’re “almost there” so we’re crossing our fingers and just on the edge of our seats waiting to see it come together.
All of the coffee and all of the brainstorming featuring Lisanne’s hands.
Lisanne and Shreya divided up all the hooks (we’ve got 180 hooks now) and put them into an Excel (no small feat). It may seem like a bit of a dull task, but hey, someone’s gotta do it. They’ve also created three different demos (with animation) so that we can really start to see: (1) if people understand that certain videos are referencing certain landmarks, (2) if people actually laugh, or feel inspired, or whatever the goal of the hook happens to be when it appears on screen and (3) how different timing strategies (for example, playing three different hooks for ten seconds apiece, then having a 20 second “break” from videos/hooks on screen) can work to our advantage. Whew. They also met up with Felipe to discuss responsive design, as we really need to start to consider how different screen dimensions will have an affect on our design. Boy oh boy. Oh, and side note: Lisanne has been deciding on typefaces for the hooks (each category will have a typeface that suits the tone of the hook) and branding the project. #wild #happydesigner #atlast #justanotherhashtag
Sunny weather finally hits Amsterdam. Most of our team is MIA from this photo but, still. Proof that there is good weather in Holland.
We all met up on Friday to see what everyone has been up to (we were all working from various locations this past week) as well as to map out all of our next steps. It goes without being said that we’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it, so… we’re putting the petal to the metal or however that saying goes. Enjoy the sunshine!