October 16, 2007 Design Meeting

Owned by Daphne Ogle
Last updated: Nov 05, 2007Version comment
3 min read

Design / UX Team Meeting

When:  October 16, 2007

Where: Fluid Breeze Room

Back-up: 
Sakai002
Conference Code: 350
PIN: 72524
Telephone: 812-856-7060 

Attendees

Eli, Allison, Colin, Barbara, Shaw-Han, Gary, Paul, Daphne

Agenda

  • Discuss case study, "The Nature of the Team" -- questions, concerns, insights?
  • Planning Session, Fluid Agile UI Design
    • Questions to consider:
      • Are there applications that can help us replicate the interactive moving around of story cards in our distributed world?
      • Do we need a coach?  If so, who interested?  Although we've talked about taking a lightweight approach, there will still be coordination and management overhead to collect and organize story cards and run the meetings.
      • What is the right level of granularity for our story cards?  My experience has been that they are pretty granular for near term activities and they get more abstract the further out they are in the plan (makes sense not to spend a lot of time on describing longer term activities since things change as we learn more and adapt).   Seems like we want to be granular enough to define realistic estimates but we'll all be working with different processes and methods depending on the project team so a certain amount of detail is probably unrealistic.
      • What is your estimated time commitment to Fluid UX activities?  We'll need to have some realistic total number of hours available in order to slot cards into the time for each iteration.  The time we each have will likely change across time depending on other work and local priorities; but we should come up with a starting point.
      • What's the right length for an iteration?  We talked having monthly planning sessions and thus iterations.  
      • What's the best way to do estimating?  My experience has been that each team member gives an estimate for a particular activity based on that individual doing the work and then an average is used for planning.  In that case, we didn't know who would be assigned to each activity at the point of estimating so it made sense to take an average.  We may have more information about who will be working on particular activities.  How does Toronto handle estimates?
    • Review UX activities -- any gaps?
    • Estimate
    • *Likely next week* Plan for upcoming iteration -- when should our iteration begin
  • Component Prioritization
    • Discuss top 3 - 5 from each problem space
    • Create top 10 Component list
    • How do we move these forward?  Volunteers to champion components on the list?

Notes

Discussed UX planning and activity management 

  • Agreement that we want to give this try
  • The Menlo case study caused some confusion since in covers agile methodologies across the development cycle.
    • at this point we are talking about planning our UX activities no necessarily how we'll manage individual projects.
    • individual working groups/projects will develop thier own plan and management methods.  Agile is a great way to manage but not necessary or always possible.
  • We'll look for applications that can support our collaborative, interactive planning
    • ACTION:  Allison to send out some ideas, we'll discuss next time
  • UX Coordination Groups were proposed and a coordinator for each (see below).
    • ACTION:  Each coordinator will take a first stab at outlining activities and project plan for their area
      • granularity depends on how much we know and how soon the activity is to happen
  • Discussed wanting to make sure people have focused time to work on activities and in a particular area - this will likely require some high level project planning to decide which projects get attention when.  We mostly have the same people working across all groups so timing will be important.
    • ACTION:  Colin will create a high level visual of what folks are currently working on.
  • Some discussion around stakeholders - who they are, we have a lot of them
    • understanding who they are can help us think about prioritization - some provided below

UX Coordination Groups
------------------------------

1. UX Walkthroughs: Paul? Someone else?

2. UX Toolkit & Design Patterns: Allison

3. User Testing: Barbara

4. U-Camp: Barbara

5. Component Design & Development: (this is probably two people) Daphne?
    File Management
    Navigation
    Layout
    Feedback

What Does a Design Group Coordinator Do?
    - determining what needs to be done & helping prioritize
    - recruiting volunteers and delegating work
    - reporting back to the community and interfacing with the other groups

Who Are the Fluid Project Stakeholders?
---------------------------------------------------

Foundations & Projects
----------------------------
* The Mellon Foundation
* The Sakai Foundation
* JA-SIG
* Kuali Student
* Moodle

Collaborating Institutions
------------------------------
* UToronto/ATRC
* UC Berkeley/ETS
* Cambridge/CARET
* York University
* UBC/IT Department

Our Project
--------------
* Board of Directors
* Steering Committee (that's us!)
* Leads: Technical and UX
* Project Manager
* The Community
   - Designers, Developers, everyone in between

Collaborating Communities
---------------------------------
* Sakai
 - designers, developers, instructional designers, etc.
* uPortal
 - designers, developers, implementors
* Kuali Student
* Moodle

Users
-------
* Students
* Faculty
* Staff
* Implementors