Week 2
Week of Feb. 8th
We continued to talk about user research and the approaches we believed would be best to use for our team. The week mostly consisted of high-level brainstorming for our ideas to be pitched to the client in this week’s meeting. We came up with several abstract and concrete ideas including data visualization through timelines, story clouds, virtual museums/libraries, and virtual visual/audio road trips.
After hearing the client’s feedback, our direction was more defined–they were leaning more towards the data visualization timeline and story cloud ideas. Our challenge was to create a meaningful relationship between the visualized data and the users. It was also clarified that we were creating an experience that could run on both smart phones and computers. Based on our research and tech demos, we believe web development is the most efficient technology for this purpose. However, we still need to learn many new technologies and test them on several demos. Other decisions(such as using frontend frameworks like React and Angular) will be made when we have more concrete ideas.
Meanwhile, we also performed some user research with our target demographic (20 to 30-year-olds). Preparing questions for the existing users of the archive and new users, we started scheduling interviews with them and looking for more student groups to interview and playtest. Near the end of the week we had another round of brainstorming fresh ideas, so next week we could hit the ground running.