The project plan, timeline and tasks
Our overall project plan from the beginning was to encourage open communication, be respectful of ideas and to provide an equal share of work as individuals to the team. We did not develop a project plan as such, however we did meet the deliverables each week and planned our work accordingly. Our project timeline looked something like this:
We delegated tasks and work based on interest in doing them. In most instances, the division of tasks was arbitrary as we were all trying to learn as much as we could and expand our abilities. Later in the project, our process became less structured. This could be attributed to disorganisation, but it could also be interpreted as a natural process in the final sprint of product development. We all knew what needed to be done, and we offered to do it based on our abilities with user testing or visual design.
Roles and responsibilities
My team, Venus, consisted of four people: Fernanda, Rachael, Ultan, and myself. Our roles and responsibilities changed over the course of the project. For two week periods, we each took on the roles of Scrum Master and Project Lead using an Agile work method. This gave us the opportunity to develop our leadership skills whilst ensuring that we each had a chance to make team decisions. At the beginning of the project we each provided a brief summary of skills and background that we brought to the group, which were as follows:
- Fernanda: Graphic designer, artist, web designer, experienced with prototypes, group activities, experience with agile
- Liz: Graphic Designer, BA Visual Communications, working in construction company
- Rachael: Product designer, good understanding of user research, has done lots of group in past projects, likes to learn from others
- Ultan: Adventurer, agile, Requirements gathering, storytelling, innovation research, ethnography.
Milestones
Our key milestones were:
- Defining our communication strategy, ethos and roles
- Conducting user research (surveys, interviews, customer review analysis, etc.)
- Defining problem statement and user needs statement
- Generating personas and empathy maps
- Defining customer journey and scenarios
- Creating our combined paper prototype
- Creating our first prototype
- Planning and preparation for user testing
- First round of user testing
- Analysis of results and refinement of prototype
- Second round of user testing
- Analysis of results
- Preparation for group presentation
