[DG: Teaching & Learning] Learning activities project: moving on to scenarios

[kamann at stanford.edu]

Hello
I just sent a note about the learning activities project, specifically about persona review. This update is on the next steps which we've embarked on. We're proceeding to the last third of the user and domain analysis, which is the Requirements Definition phase. In the Goal Directed Design process, this phase includes describing high-level scenarios that our primary and secondary personas would find themselves in, then deriving the data and functional needs the persona would have in those scenarios.

Since there are dozens of potential scenarios, we needed to prioritize areas of focus. The table on http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/UX/Requirements+Definition describes broad functional areas that the personas would likely need, depending on what stage of their course they are at.  That table then describe the order in which we'll tackle these areas this month: we'll be writing context scenarios that concern cross-activity areas first, then move on to areas that are more specific test and quiz like functionality. The last step of the Requirements Definition phase is deriving data and functional needs from these scenarios. These will directly inform the next two design phases, Framework Definition (how those needs manifest themselves as elements of the screen) and Refinement (sketching of those elements). 

Foundation-sponsored design work has already occurred for several cross-activity areas (http://sakaipm.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/leading-design/) but I think it would be worthwhile to see if it addresses the needs that stem from these scenarios; we expect the designs will hold up for the most part, but we'll make note of elements that aren't there for future consideration by the designer.

Design work has occurred for some activity-specific areas, like paper descriptions, but not for others, like those relevant to problem sets and tests. This latter area is where we plan to concentrate our design efforts after March, with some revisiting of the former.

There are a few functional areas that were left unscheduled—-we are likely to use these as examples for a hands-on workshop at the Sakai conference.

When I asked if anyone was interested in helping to develop scenarios after Feb 9, Daphne, Kristol, Salwa and Whitten responded. At this point, we plan to meet 4 hours a week this March and have had too meetings. We'll be keeping rough notes linked off the "requirements definition" URL above, hopefully to be refined by the end of the week. As we get to a point in the scenario where we need more detail, we'll refer to our interview notes or possibly talk to more instructors or the community. The hope is that we can finalize the set of scenarios or the data/functional needs for each area at the end of the week. 

If you have questions about this process, write to me or add them as comments to the notes pages.

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing, Stanford University