Interaction Design — Park By Text — Entry 5

Teamwork and Collaboration

This group project was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It meant all of our collaboration, discussions and decision making had to be done online. This had a negative impact on quite a few areas but most noticeably our efficiency of communication. Decisions often took longer to make than you would expect, even relatively inconsequential ones, and we ended up duplicating work — usually intentionally so that we could convey our ideas. For instance we each created a mid fidelity mockup of the main home screens. This was made necessary by the fact that working online it was far harder for more than one person to work on one piece with a singular vision. Had we been in a room together I think we would have found a way to collaborate on our ideas more naturally, efficiently and in real time.

Having said that we still managed to propose a version of the app that is far improved, and user centric, and in which we all played a key role and no one voice overpowered the others.

We didn’t rigidly stick to our roles defined in our team charter, and largely arrived at a place where we operated not unlike an agile SCRUM team, where one person facilitated the meeting and as a group we worked out what needed to be done, and volunteered to do the tasks based largely on interest and availability.

Our collaboration was usually done over MS Teams, with the help of Mural, Figma and Adobe XD.

Ethics

Ethical considerations for this project did not fall far from the norm for developing any public facing application. We were careful to ensure all data collected was anonymous, and that participants were informed what their data would be used for. We also defaulted to microsoft products as they are provided by IADT so we have more visibility on where the data is hosted. One minor issue that arose was that usability testers were under the impression that this app was going to be released, but that was easily addressed and we were more explicit about the scope of this project for future tests.

Reflections & Conclusion

Though the team worked largely ungoverned, and every member delivered work in every area, I think it is fair to say that Celine naturally adopted a role of leadership. She spearheaded our user research questionnaires as well as developing the format our usability testing would take, and was organised and enthusiastic throughout the project. Leah and Hannah were a wealth of knowledge and strong opinions when it came to the aesthetics of our work, and really had a lot of impact on how we used tone of voice, color and space in our prototypes. Hannah pushed us to consider the big picture repeatedly throughout the project, and helped us out of cyclical discussions, veering off course and detail oriented dead ends, famously once stopping the conversation in the last few weeks to ask “have we even made the app any better?”, thankfully we concluded we had, and the usability testing affirmed that, but always worth considering. Daniel took ownership often, and made sure we reached deadlines by combining our work into workable prototypes. He also took charge of our user observations and the voice activated part of the prototype, among other areas.

Overall I think we worked well as a team, there was a lot of discussion, humor and hard work.

With regards to my own work I feel like my most meaningful contributions were probably in prototyping. Connecting a flow end to end proved to be a great tool in finding logical flows or unconsidered journeys through the app. I have more experience in this area compared to other aspects of the process, but still learned a lot.

When working I have a tendency to focus too much time on parts of the process that I enjoy (prototyping), and working as a group helps you address that. We clearly defined what we wanted from each section, and this agreement kept me from skimming over some of the parts that I need to put more discipline into.

Working as a group also helped me avoid confirmation bias, which I can be prone to. I.e., helped me avoid cherry-picking information that supported my preconceived ideas of how the project should go.