Remote Project Management Application
Design for a simple application for remote student collaborations
Researchers
Keziah May, Ian Dudder, Hailey Schauman, Kaveh Buenaventura, Angela Ferro Capera, Jason Dekema
Background
In the remote environment initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, students rely on remote collaboration tools more than ever. In an effort to understand the needs of students who are working on projects in a team, we designed, prototyped, and tested an application for remote project management.
Research
To understand how to design this application, we explored how users interact with existing software, how they would use the application, and what features would be most attractive to them. We identified 4 main personas: students (of two different age groups), professors, and student managers (students who manage their team). To accomodate the time constraints on this project, we focused our time primarily on the student manager persona.
Ethnographic Research
Early in our design process, we studied the way people work in teams remotely. Since this project was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we used an experimental approach to ethnographic research which involved searching the internet for user reviews and user stories. Then, we combined our findings into a single document and used card sorting to determine patterns in our data. Five patterns emerged:
- Remote learning and teamwork
- Online collaboration
- Project management
- Communication
- Customization
User Interviews
To derive minimum viable product requirements, we interviewed 6 university students about their experience with remote collaboration. We wanted to answer a number of general research questions with these interviews:
- What experience does this user have with remote projects?
- What tasks, technologies, and devices are involved in the user's remote projects?
- How does the user like to communicate with their team? What technologies for communication are a must?
- How does the user share and collaborate on work with their team?
- What methods of task management are most important to the user?
- What frustrates/delights the user about completing group projects with existing technology?
Inspiration Search
After determining the exisiting technologies that were most commonly used by our interview participants, we set out to understand those tools and what aspects of them should be used as inspiration to our design. Each member of the team chose a different tool and completed an analysis of it. the results were then presented at our next meeting. The results of this activity became our Completitive and Inspirational Alternatives document.
UI Sketching
Once we had decided on our minimum viable product, learned about the needs of our target users, and identified existing software for UI and functionality inspiration, we were ready to start sketching our ideas for the UI. In this stage, we took a non-traditional approach to storyboarding that involved writing a user story and showing sketches of what the UI might do.
Each team member created their own UI storyboard. We then came together as a team to talk about what we liked from each example and created a synthesised storyboard. This became our Storyboard Exercise document.
Prototype Usability Study
Using our synthesised UI storyboard, we designed a prototype that could support the minimum required functionality for our application. We used it to complete a usability study with 6 participants. We then presented our findings to each other at our weekly meeting and used those findings to prioritize modifications that must be implemented in our final prototype. This became our Usability Testing document.