Timeline
Week 5's Tasks, Own Work.
My timeline for this week showcases a lot of tasks that were pushed from previous weeks or naturally followed from previous tasks. I am so incredibly determined to start low fidelity prototyping this week, so although it is listed as a single task, it is my focus. I do like how many of my research tasks are small supplementary tasks that can be completed quickly alongside my prototyping work. I feel this this week is my key to stepping out of my iterative research stage and into my iterative prototyping stage.
This week strongly intertwines my design and discover stage, and calls the 'learning through doing' mindset shown in the 'Six Mindsets for Co-Design' from Beyond Sticky Notes (2020) below in Figure 1. This mindset highlights building learning capacity and unlearning fear of failure. Every prototype is an opportunity to put hypotheses into practice through several loops of learning. (McKercher, 2020) I don't want to assume what will work and commit to elevating lived experience, as encouraged by McKercher. I do know that I am not elevating the experience of my demographic, however, I am committed to learning and practicing these skills for my future.
Figure 1. Six Mindsets for Co-Design. From What is co-design? An overview, by Beyond Sticky Notes, 2020 (https://www.beyondsticky-notes.com/what-is-codesign).
Volunteering
At the start of the week I played more Scrabble with the care home resident I interacted with in previous weeks. During this time I asked some questions about their family and their time at the care home. I learned that this resident has a neutral/dismissive disposition to technology, lived the life of a home body, and is often bought word puzzle books by their sibling. They mentioned that the care home has a busy schedule to keep them entertained, so I had a look at it after our time together. There are many physical and mental exercises scheduled: quizzes, bingo, arthritis exercises, documentaries, board games, entertainment videos, and riddles, to name a few. I think it's good to note the type of stimulation scheduled by professional staff and will be asking more questions about it going forward.
Reflecting on Reflection
I've decided to include a section where I reflect on my blog posts so far with feedback from the teaching team. To start, I have decided to include better subheadings for section readability. I noticed this was an issue as I was writing large chunks of text for 'Week Tasks' and then linking blog posts for specific sections. When trying to follow these links, it was tricky to pinpoint the section I was referring to. As well as this, I no longer want to add the tail end of previous weeks into the start of the following week's blog. I feel like this decreases readability of my process and my archive. I have heard from a friend that multiple posts for one week isn't favoured well by markers. However, I believe it works well for me and follows the "updates blog more often than required" comment in the marking rubric.
I was graded well for my blogs with lots of feedback. Below I have summarised the feedback:
Review the Reflector's Toolkit to develop a way to make action plans.
Evaluate your experiences in a way that you can make reccomendations for improvement.
Be sure to evaluate improvement in yourself, your processes, methods, future projects.
Annotate parts of the Miro board that I think presented challenges and how I can approach them differently next time.
From this feedback I have compiled some next steps:
Revisit the Reflector's Toolkit to find tools to incorporate an action plan.
Brainstormed some areas for improvement below my modified cycle.
Plan to add red notes to my Miro board alongside each relevant section with challenges/improvement commentary.
Steps 2 and 3 are covered in the section below. It feels good to evaluate my reflective process and I think these next steps will help improve my blogs towards my report.
Reflective Cycle
My initial thought was to integrate the 'Action Plan' part of the Gibbs' Reflective Cycle into my Integrated Reflective Cycle. Though, after some research using the Reflection Toolkit, I realise that the 'Preparation' stage of the Integrated Cycle works well to generate action plans. Previously, I was using this section to 'prepare for future tasks within my project' rather than 'prepare for future similar situations.' I feel that my lack of attention during the lecture and toolkit review allowed me to come to this conclusion. Therefore, my reflective process using a cycle could be made better by more closely following it's meaning.
When writing my blogs previously, I would open the Week 3 blog that contained my summarised version of the Integrated Reflective Cycle and follow the stages listed. From now on, I will navigate here and open the link directly to the website. This means that I will write alongside the intended descriptions and ideal questions to ask myself provided by Bassot (2013). In the future working with full or well-summarised descriptions of models will help me avoid similar assumptions.
Throughout writing this blog, the amount of detail implemented through the reflective cycle has left me quite mentally tired and dreading the writing. Previously my natural structured reflective process was quite easy. I am proud of the quality of my writing and I'm happy for the quality content towards my report. To alleviate this I am determined to finish writing my next week's first blog on Wednesday.
Improvement
Where, specifically, could I find areas to reflect on improvement? I've brainstormed some areas below to look at while writing:
My learning
My behaviour
Processes
Methods
Connection to the brief
Connection to methodology and toolkit
Commentary/reflection
I'll come back and add to this if I find any more, but this will serve well to jog my brain while writing future blogs.
Scope Feedback
During my class on Monday I saw the opportunity to get feedback from a few people I hadn't talked to before, and one that I had. This mix allowed for both novel and stronger insights. I held this feedback session more informally than the last one and was loose with reciprocity. However, I created space for feedback to be asked of me. I scrolled through my recent work and invited comments and conversation, then was able to separate feedback into four topics: brain training, concept, suggestions, and demographic accessibility. The more influential comments are listed below:
It's ideal to include both familiar games and lesser-known brain training games.
Consider whether chat history is important to the app.
Consider the role of your chatbot and how that influences your UX/UI.
It would be nice for the user to be able to 'facetime' the AI
Does it need to be an app? Consider making it a website.
The feedback on my concepts was more broad than I wanted, potentially due to the lack of specificity in my prototype. Next session I want a stronger concept and a more structured feedback session to reduce this.
The aim was to practice many of the mindsets seen in Figure 1, specifically elevating lived experience in regards to my design choices. This was a great step and contributed to my growing project, but I remember feeling exasperated and like I was 'stuck in the research mud.' It was like I was taking two steps forward and one step back, as I attempted to inch towards a goal but also hold direction shift suggestions in high regard. Specifically the comment questioning my app direction threw me for a loop, as it made sense to me as a research question. Developing for web would remove accessiblity concerns about mobile keyboards. It would also remove the limitation around platform compatibility. I explore this suggestion the next section.
Upon reflecting I've learned I need to lean into this feeling of being 'stuck in the mud'. To quote McKercher when talking about the 'learning through doing' mindset, "If we’re not learning through doing, we are in the past where we assumed what would work." (McKercher, 2020) There's no shame in taking one step toward prototyping then spinning back around to research again. For my own personal process, I'm interested in staying 'in the mud' while also getting prototyping done where I can. That is, following with my original interpretation of the co-design methodology and initiating the 'discover' phase throughout all other phases of my project. This was in my original work plan and I shouldn't feel stagnant just because there's more research to do. In the future I'd like to continue developing projects in this way so I have more practice, as I do like the challenge of learning slow development.
Platform Research
To get a better picture of what my users may want, I utilised the 'Value Proposition Canvas' suggested to me by a peer in Week 3.
Figure 2. Value Proposition Canvas with personal project notes. Own work adapted from The Value Proposition Canvas, by Stategyzer, 2020 (https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/value-proposition-canvas).
I followed the guide and description by B2B International (n.d.), referencing Osterwalder et al. (2014) "Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want". On the righthand side, the customer profile. This is where I note things the customer expects and needs, their negative experiences, and the tasks the customers are trying to perform. On the lefthand side, the value map. This is where I map our how my solution creates customer gains and alleviates customer pains. This tool aims to model the relationship between the customer segment and value propositions sections of the Business Model Canvas, which I expanded in Week 2. Specifically, I found in a study done on business ventures, that validating these sections have some of the highest predictors of success.
My reasoning for this model was to pinpoint how which platform would best suit my customer needs and project outcomes. The key area for me was accessible implementations. My assumption was that a keyboard would improve the accessibility of communication of older adults, however, research suggests that physical and cognitive problems prove themselves as a barrier to PC usage with mouse and keyboard. (Eilers, 1989, as cited in Richardson, 2005) I also assumed that more older adults would use PCs over smartphones due to the early adoption of computers by society. However, according to New Zealand Seniors' Digital Trends Report (2022), smart phones are the most important device for 43% of adults over 50. Personal computers come in a close second at 38%.
Figure 3. Ranking the value map points in terms of project value. Own Work.
Above in Figure 3 I have followed B2B International's advice and ranked the gain creators, pain relivers, and services on a scale from 'Essential' to 'Nice to have.' I've done this to see the match of my project to my value map. I acknowledge that the information I have filled Figure 2 and Figure 3 with may be biased to my project, meaning it may show a deceptively good fit to current development. However, I believe that I can't work with what I don't know and can only move forward with this bias in mind.
Based on the prevalence of brain training apps, research done into an accessible app implementation, platform comparisons, and the project's fit to the value maps in Figure 2 and Figure 3, I am going to stay the course of making a phone app. In future projects I will do this research earlier by prioritising critical feedback tasks (i.e. I was recommended this in Week 3 and now it's Week 5) and exploration of the space. This can also be avoided in subsequent co-design projects by having a stronger implementation of the 'Discover' stage.
Low Fidelity Prototyping
I made a start into low fidelity prototyping by playing with Inworld's AI, attempting to make an IBM account, and researching code/pricing.
Inworld
I went through the standard process of creating an InWorld AI character by following the process and reading documentation. You can try out this AI here. The outcome is a trial of the software and not necessarily the best and optimised outcome. This involved the following steps:
Writing a core description to be the foundation of my character. I included knowledge about being a respectful, kind, mental health companion for older adults.
Adding the character's motivations, which supplemented the core description.
Adding one word character traits, namely: Accessible, Adaptable, Patient, Professional, and Simple
I also added a dialogue style that names my companion as giving short 5 to 30 word responses using simple words. This was after running the program and not being happy with the wordy responses.
Adding factual knowledge, namely information about the sections of my app concept in case a user asks.
Played with hardcoded interactions, named 'Goals.' I added one that instructs the AI to congratulate the player when they mention having achieved something.
Created a 3D avatar to talk to the user.
I was trying to get as close to my ideal AI as possible. This was achieved, however, there are some issues around recalling knowledge (step 5) and the topic content. I believe these can be resolved with more time put into creation. After more research, I found that my AI can be used online with two code languages, React and C++. I feel happy about the prospect of getting a program running in either language and being able to use Inworld's SDK to implement my character. As React is a JavaScript library, I'm drawn to trying this one first (prior experience), and found an app tutorial I want to follow here. Pricing-wise, there is a fee of $20 a month to use my character's SDK. I'm willing to pay this for my capstone if it seems like the best option. However, a challenge I'm not sure I can get past are the bugs in the editor for goals (step 6). The editor does not let you know if you've written your goals incorrectly, and refuses to let you save - making it incredibly hard to debug code. I'm going to put more effort into trying out similar programs, like Dialogflow, to see if I can get a better experience.
DialogFlow
At this stage I've only done minor research and a review of DialogFlow's features. It seems to have many of the implementations that Inworld does, but at a more advanced level. With this implementation I have more control over the behaviour of my bot. It can integrate into a javascript implementation like Inworld can, but I'll need to use a third-party software like Uneeq to create a visual avatar. Pricing-wise I get $600 free credits, and it's $0.007 per request and $0.001 per second. A bit of math says that's 85.7k requests or 166.6 hours of talking. I'm pretty sure I wont exceed that during development, but it's interesting to consider for deployment.
IBM Watson
Unfortunately, little can be said about IBM Watson in terms of my project. I tried 3 different email addresses and 2 payment methods but was unable to have my account verified. Upon contacting IBM support, I was denied service and communication as mentioned in my Week 4 post. I managed to create a student account, however, that only had access to text resources. My stream supervisor sent an email to the lead technician to create an IBM account under UoA but nothing has come of it yet. It's a little complicated to gauge pricing for IBM's services as well. I'm willing to put this route under 'too hard' and focus on the technology that works for me for now.
Next Steps
Presentation: I have to complete a presentation by Monday. I honestly had forgotten about it until this point, and this will be my priority from now.
Brand Guideline: I want to pinpoint colours, tone, assets, and a design that works for my project.
UX/UI Design Guideline: I want to collect all my accessibility research insights so far into one guideline I can follow in the future. I am also willing to move this task as it's no imperative to my prototyping right now, but nice to have.
Personas: I'm willing to leave this task as my research, models (Figure 2 for example), and existing personas seem to have a good depth and relation to my project. My current personas are described in Week 3.
References
B2B International. (n.d.). What is the Value Proposition Canvas? https://www.b2binternational.com/research/methods/faq/what-is-the-value-proposition-canvas/
Bassot, B. (2013). The Reflective Journal. Basingstoke: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315768298
Beyond Sticky Notes. (2020). What is Co-design? An overview. https://www.beyondstickynotes.com/what-is-codesign
McKercher, A. K., (2020). Beyond Sticky Notes: Doing Co-design for Real. https://www.beyondstickynotes.com/
New Zealand Seniors. (2022). The Digital Trends Report. https://www.nzseniors.co.nz/documents/the-digital-trends-report-2022-whitepaper.pdf
Richardson, M., Weaver, C. K., Zorn, T. E. (2005). ‘Getting on’: older New Zealanders’ perceptions of computing. SAGE Publiciations, 7(2) 219-245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444805050763
Strategyzer, (2020). The Value Proposition Canvas. https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/value-proposition-canvas