Mission Graduate
Reflections
What have we learned as a group of team in terms of research, effective group work and project management
What have we learned so far?
- Research phase
Preparation in advance is essential in a productive meeting, especially when we have to work with time zones. This includes:
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The Project Manager drafting the meeting agenda ahead of time;
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Individual brainstorming session for ideas;
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Writing down our insights and takeaways from the research;
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Communications over Slack and seperate meet-ups if things are not clear
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Rotating notetakers
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Keeping contacts with stakeholders extracts the valuable information they already have.
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Finding the gap between us and learners helps with further research in the next.
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Collecting different voices from the stakeholders and target learners helps us to brainstorm with new peerspectives
Insights from the
current research
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The framework for a strong first-year orientation program currently exists.
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A journey just needs to be created to guide new students to become more productive and self-directed as they enter the graduate program.
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Understand the needs of the students is the key to identify what is left out in the orientation program.
Effective project
management
Communication with
the stakeholders
How do we collaborate?
Effective project management
Communication with stakeholders
What have we learned so far?
- Design phase
Impact of Student Survey and Logic Model
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The student survey and understanding how students use current resources was really helpful in refocusing our goals/objectives for the entire project. At first, it felt like we were tackling too many broad goals, which made it hard to think about design solutions. As we got feedback from other peers and Maaike that we were being very “ambitious” with our initial three goals, we started to get more specific with our goals and objectives. Getting more specific allowed us to really hone in on our ideas and helped us in creating a realistic product within a constrained time frame.
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As ECT graduate students who have been here for one year, we initially thought the most important part for new students was identifying a career path. However, the survey told us that the most pressing problem for them was arranging the courses and allocating time in the first semester.
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The step-by-step logic model activity helped us clear the relationship among the activities, outcomes, and impact, especially when we finalize the impact by following the “start at the end (impact)” method.
Team Communication & Organization
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We really enjoyed using Trello and didn’t realize how helpful it was until we actually did it. We appreciated the transparency in our to-do lists. When we send to-do list items on Slack or even a Google calendar, it can often get lost and elements are forgotten. Trello allows you to really focus on every task and the domino effect of each task that needs to be completed.
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We have set an alternative meeting time block each week just in case we have to meet for one more time or we need to switch the meeting time due to time conflicts. This makes our meetings more organized and make sure we can meet for the project for once a week.
How do we collaborate?
Kanban board project management
Original Kanban Board set-up
After the tasks are completed
What have we learned so far?
- Development phase
Independent work &
group consolidation
Working on a design independently and consolidating it with Ruobing’s was actually a really helpful exercise. While it may have added more work for us, I think it made the whole design process more collaborative.
It was interesting to see the differences in our designs and learn from each other’s creative take on it. With two designs, we were able to narrow down key elements we want to include based on looking at what we both did similarly and differently. It was helpful to have something to compare it to. It was like having two iterations but at once!
- SAMHITA
Timely comments and feedback
The in-team feedback system works very well in our group. When each prototype is ready, the creator would post it in our group channel and everyone has the responsibility to provide timely feedback and comments on it. It’s a good way to make sure everyone’s on the same page, and also an invisible push to everyone to really think about our the feasibility and sustainability of our design. The consolidation work is easier and more on the target when intense comments and feedbacks are given. We are not emitting live critiques session in the group, however, this really helps to speed up the work process and makes sure what we create is actually what we were looking for.
-RUOBING
Scope of the our project
Scope creep was a challenge for our team in the very beginning because our stakeholders were faculty members who were currently administrating the orientation process. It took us time to reflect, research and create specific goals and objectives that would meet the specific needs of New Students at ECT instead of the ECT faculty members who were focused on more than the orientation experience.
One of the ways that we addressed this bias was asking other students about their experiences to find common themes in their responses. If I was to do the project again, I would create 2 workstreams:
1. ECT New Student Orientation (our current project) 2. ECT Career Support ( the second piece of the puzzle).
This should be an ongoing project really centered around helping new students learn about the different opportunities to challenge themselves to grow at NYU.
-MARTINE
Aggressive usage on technology and tool
Teamwork is a perfect process of learning from each other's strengths and close the gap. Fortunately, I'm in a group that can get timely feedback. I always get inspiration from other members.
In addition, a design project allows me to try many tools and find the right one for me. For example, I discovered Canvas is much easier to use as a storyboard tool than the "storyboard that" for our project in particular. We also bring in Slack bot and Bite-size videos that are based on our own work experiences and social media preferences. Also, in this project, I have gradually adapted to Trello as a project management tool. And all of us did a lot of research on different tools and technologies we can bring in to make the orientation experience engaging and fun, this is useful for us as learning designers.
-QIRAN
How do we collaborate?
Kanban board project management
Proving feedback and revise
In our group, we value everyone's opinions and feedback to each phase we are going through as a way to make sure everyone is on the same page. For the development phase, we decided to have two members working on the user storyboard/medium-fidelity prototype using Canva, with a focus on content layout and user flow, and the other two members working on the high-fidelity prototype in Figma. This allows an iteration and consolidation process to happen with the two versions based on the opinions and feedback we collected as a team. Here is an example of how this iteration and revision process worked out in this phase:
Weekly meeting agenda and full participation
Our weekly meeting is held every Sunday morning at 9 AM EDT. Before the meeting happens, the Project Manager would send out an agenda to the team according to the project timeline and the milestone as assigned to make sure we best use our time at the meeting. We usually have one person share their screen and work off the Milestone document together as a team with the key ideas, and if necessary, we usually assign members to finalize and finish off the rest after the meeting.
What have we learned so far?
- Evaluation phase
Listening to stakeholders and learners
Our iterative process played to our benefit and it was seen during the usability tests we conducted on the website experience. Getting constant feedback from Maaike, classmates and evaluating it ourselves throughout our entire process helped our group create something that students could envision themselves using.
We made it a point to share our website and donut portion of the orientation experience to people who aren’t in our class and haven’t seen our project to get an authentic reaction. As we evaluated their reactions, we saw common themes and reactions across the board which helped us identify what was working and what needed to change. The affinity map we created on Mural helped us identify these themes and changes and gave us a platform to discuss it too.
And it was helpful to listen to students connecting their own experience and learning preferences into evaluating our prototype, which really makes us think through ways to make the design more accessible and approachable to more students possible, providing them an impactful, meaningful and welcoming journey to ECT.
- SAMHITA & RUOBING
Listening to stakeholders and learners
This project required our team to leverage online tools to collaborate virtually across different time zones. All of us have gained a lot of experience in asynchronous communication and with the help of various online collaborative tools to achieve our planning, design, evaluation, and project management, such as Google Suite, Slack, Mural, Trello, and Zoom.
On the project side, the use of these tools helped us put ourselves in the new students’ shoes, because new students will be trying to find and access information virtually on their own. As a result, our solutions reflected and aligned to what a virtual orientation process should entail in order to be seamless. This included revisiting the different touchpoints students have online before joining live sessions. These walkthroughs created a journey map for us to include a more refined instructional design element to the online resource and introduce a new tool that would enable the admins of the orientation process to efficiently track students' progress and participation in key events. A seamless digital experience is an important step for the faculty to make a good impression on new students and understand the best way to create more on-demand resources in the near future that students can find and provide real-time feedback.
-MARTINE & QIRAN
Being fully prepared for usability testing
By using the knowledge some of us learned from User Research Methods class, we drafted a detailed protocol to assist our Zoom usability test, with the scripts prepared, interview questions and guiding prompts laid out for the think-aloud session. In the process of testing, we still found that the reactions and reflections of the learner are different from what we expected. That is good to see the differences between what I expected and the learner's demands. We can learn how to improve our design.
Because we are fully prepared for the usability testing, we were able to get a lot of information from them and make our design even better. This also makes us realize that understanding the learners is just as important as understanding and satisfying the stakeholders. The benefits of us valuing both of them show up in our evaluation phase that our stakeholders and students have great positive feedback as well as valuable insights on how to iterate and revise the prototype and implementation of the new tool.
-RUOBING & QIRAN
Excited to see the project to be carried out soon!
This project really bonds us together in considering each other's skillsets and what we would like to learn. We were able to collaborate efficiently by using time on and offline and hitting all the target deadlines and assignments that are assigned to one specific member. A clear divide of individual work and (sub) teamwork really helps us to practice what we have learned in this class. For some of us, this is their first project that is entirely online, which can be challenging but fun as well. We are excited to see this project developing from sketch, and finally being able to actually become live for the next cohort that's coming soon!
-TEAM