Tag: press-release-4

Press release #4: The Cumulonimbus System: Snow Won’t Stop Analysis

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Blacksburg, VA., Mar 3, 2015 – This week, team Cumonlonimbus devoted time to launch an analysis of its subject. Called a contextual analysis, the group gathered information from interviews, organized it, and reviewed their results. Although it did snow quickly this week, it did not deter the team from completing these tasks!

Before analyzing data, data must first be obtained. The team strategically interviewed five people that do take many photos, whether professionally or as a hobby. Next, the team (physically) creates a WAAD: A Work Activity Affinity Diagram

The interview notes are written onto sticky notes. Then, team members take a sticky note and attach it onto a wall through tape, based on similarities. When clusters form, the team decides to pick a keyword that describes the certain cluster. This process is repeated multiple times until the team is satisfied.

In addition, the team decided to create simple personas to represent scope categories created from the WAAD. Matthew Bock says, “We can determine common points of interest between groups and ideas important to one group that may have a positive impact on other groups of users.” These personas will grow in the next stage.

The WAAD helps by highlighting find common user thoughts and experiences. Finally, those notes are used to build interaction requirement statements. These statements will help Team Cumulonimbus during the prototype and design phase by highlighting the certain areas or goals that the team can pursue. Three categories from these interaction requirement statements are “Collaborative Photo Albums”, “Easily Accessible Interface”, and “Multiple Upload Methods”.

After this milestone, the team has decided to take a week-long break. Sometimes, the semester does tax the body physically and mentally. When the break is over, classes resume and the same goes with team Cumulonimbus. They will focus on researching the prototype process in order to attempt a prototype impression.

Team Cumulonimbus is a team of three senior level computer science students at Virginia Tech: Matthew Bock, Romico Macatula, and Tyler Haines. All three of them have extensive skill sets in computer science after their years of study. With several semesters of experience in the field of human­-computer interaction at their disposal, the team is dedicated to creating the best experience possible for their users through rigorous testing and design iteration. Any questions or comments, contact Romico Macatula at rmac817@vt.edu.

Press release #4: Civil War driving tour app developers conduct contextual inquiry; form categories to extract project requirements from

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BLACKSBURG, Va., March 6, 2015 – This week was a productive week for the three developers, Laura Avakian, Seth Canon, and Ryan Kiel. The three of them conducted an important part of the human-computer interaction (HCI) development process — the contextual inquiry.

Each developer interviewed two individuals to understand the thought process behind the user. In doing so, they each downloaded an already-existing iPhone driving tour app (Ryan downloaded Historic Colorado Driving Tour Pikes Peak Area, Laura downloaded Annapolis Driving Tours, and Seth downloaded Dunwoody Driving Tour app).

The three of them had their interviewees play around with these apps and answer questions to give insight into what the user is thinking when using this kind of app, and further allow them to understand the user experience for a driving tour from a perspective other than the developer’s.

The team then created an affinity diagram by pulling out particular quotes, notions, frustrations, successes, positives and negatives, etc from the interviews and writing them on sticky notes. These sticky notes were arranged to highlight common themes and place them into categories that were seen in these interviews. These themes will be kept in mind while developing the app itself.

For example, Kara Trimpin, one of Laura’s interviewee’s, noted that her favorite part of the Annapolis Driving Tours app is “…that it involves so many historical sites and yet it is so easy to keep them straight and navigate back to look at a different site you were interested in.”

Lastly, the team did a “requirements extraction,” where they decided what was most important to keep in mind for the next step in terms of problems and solutions. A written report detailing all of this will be provided to the team’s boss, Professor Kurt Luther.

Next week, the team will be out of the office, but will be in touch about approaching the next milestone, which is an integral piece to the development of this Civil War driving tour app — prototyping. Stay tuned!

Contact Laura Avakian for any further inquiries.

Press release #4: Pass It On! Inc Moves Past Contextual Inquiry; Ideas Flowing for Prototyping

Kurt Luther Leave a comment

Blacksburg, VA, March 6, 2015: Through the past week the members of Pass It On! Inc have been conducting interviews to gather user feedback to help improve their product. With five diverse interviews having been conducted, the group feels that it has gathered information to help design Pass It On!

For interviewing each member of Pass It On! was asked to find an ideal candidate, someone who they thought fit the system best, and to ask them to perform tasks from some sites the team discovered during the Competitive Analysis. When performing these tasks the interviewees were asked feedback questions related to their experience using all of these sites.

Results were primarily focused on user experience. Some of the most common complaints were that the layouts of two of the sites they used were very poor and detracted from the experience. Another common feedback was that one of the sites was limited in location and if you were out of their service area then the site was unusable. Analyzing these results and feedback will help the team sort their ideas and will help to improve the design of Pass It On!

Starting soon the team plans to move onto prototyping, keeping in mind the feedback they have gathered over the past week. The team is excited to be able to move some of their ideas for the site from paper into actual mockups. If you or anyone you know are interested in providing feedback in the coming weeks of these prototypes, email Alex!

Some Quotes from the team:

“The contextual inquiry went well this week, I’m really excited to start on the prototypes next week!” -Joshua White

“I’m very excited to begin work on prototyping. I have some great ideas and I think it will be fun to finally visualize our system. The feedback from the contextual inquiry will be very helpful when coming up with our designs.” -Matthew Chittum

Press release #4: J5 Puts Themselves in Users’ Shoes

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Blacksburg, Va., Mar. 6, 2015 ­

J5 has completed its contextual inquiry, contextual analysis, and requirements extraction!

With all the excitement surrounding the development of The Gaming Social Network, people were literally lined up to be interviewed for the Contextual Inquiry(1) phase of development.

Team member Daniel Rusz said “It’s important to consider what the users want out of our system so that they will enjoy using it when it is released”.

In addition to considering what the user wants, the contextual inquiry phase also helps J5 to prioritize features based on what the user deems important.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “An application like this can include a limitless number of features. It’s important to prioritize our efforts on the ones that the users deem important rather than ones they won’t use or care about”.

After the contextual inquiry, J5 began their analysis phase to produce a work activity affinity diagram. This diagram helps to visualize how all of the features of the application should be organized.

Team member Parham Ghazanfari said “Our WAAD helped us create our design requirements”.

Using the work activity affinity diagram, J5 was able to extract the design requirements for the system. The design requirements are used by the developers to prioritize certain features that coincide with design ideas.

Now that the design requirements are done, J5 is ready to begin the initial prototyping for their application.

1) ­ The contextual inquiry is the phase in which the developers interview potential users about what they would like to see in the application.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Press release #4: AddHawk Performs a Contextual Inquiry and Extracts Design Requirements

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BLACKSBURG, Va., March 6, 2015 – AddHawk is a group of Computer Science students taking their Human­ Computer Interaction capstone project to a massive scale. They begun working on an application called PixelPusher, a massive crowdsourced display in Lane Stadium, using all the attendees mobile device screens as pixels. This type of project, mobile phone mosaics, has been attempted by several companies before, including Sony, HTC, and Blinkendroid. “The current guinness world record is 400 devices, we’re optimistically looking at 50,000.” said PixelPusher developer Michael Peter. The current record belongs to China Unicom, Sohu IT and HTC which used 400 HTC One devices in July of 2013, playing a one minute advertisement. This project could beat that record by over a hundred times the amount of screens.

Updates on PixelPusher:

Over the course of the past week, the AddHawk team completed the stages of Contextual Inquiry, Contextual Analysis, and Requirements extraction. A set of potential users were chosen, all with the common trait that they have attended Virginia Tech football games and may again in the future and or were in our domain of potential users. To get a wide set of results, other characteristics of the users were much more varied. Outliers such as individuals with only very basic working knowledge of a smartphone and other Computer Science students were chosen. Since this is a continuing process, please feel free to contact us at cmw2379@vt.edu and we would love to hear your opinion and ask you some questions.

“It’s really important to get a look at very different users. In order for this project to be successful, its absolutely critical that the implementation feels accessible to virtually every fan with a smartphone.” said AddHawk Backend Developer Michael Peter.

Contextual Analysis revealed striking similarities between many of the users. Almost every person interviewed revealed that they would be interested in having a display when attending a Virginia Tech football game, but the effort required to create signs for themselves was the ultimate limiting factor. Also, the process of getting enough people together to perform this is difficult to coordinate. One of our lead Frontend developers, Connor Hoene, has strong feeling about this stating, “Building a way to interact with a crowd that uses your smartphone is such an incredible idea and such a natural extension of how we use our phones nowadays. The fact that something like this doesn’t already exist is staggering”. Alongside all of team AddHawks successes this week, the team is excited with what they learned and look forward to moving forward with this process. Once again, the team is building PixelPusher for the community and would love any input you, the people, would like to share. If you want to say hi, or give us a piece of your mind, please let us know at cmw2379@vt.edu.

A Look Into the Future:

With a much stronger understanding of the potential user base of PixelPusher and their requirements, it is time for the AddHawk team to begin its first round of prototyping. The team is very excited to finally get a chance to test out the several different ideas that they’ve been debating since the idea first took flight. Frontend developer Dillon Gresham enthusiastically stated, “In this set of interviews we were able to communicate with potential Users which really helped us narrow our prototype ideas down. The team gained a lot of insight into how Hokie football fans view their smart phones and the applications the phones hold.”

Mission Statement:

PixelPusher will allow football fans in Lane Stadium at Virginia Tech to display individual pixels on their phones which are part of a larger image. In this way PixelPusher acts as a crowd­sourced collaboration application that will bring together football fans everywhere. PixelPusher also aims to break the current world record of 400 connected devices. The application will be developed with the idea of simplicity and efficiency at heart, providing a lightweight, seamless user interface to football fans at Virginia Tech.

“AddHawk is an up and coming software development initiative aimed at revolutionizing how a single member of a crowd can have a huge impact on an event. ”

For more information or questions please contact: cmw2379@vt.edu