Milestone 2 Report

This assignment is a component of Milestone 2. Be sure you have reviewed that larger context for this assignment.

The goal of this report is to communicate and reflect on what you learned in your design research, including revisiting the formulation of your design problem and organizing findings around themes that can help inform your design.

You are free to directly reuse content produced for earlier assignments in this milestone. However, you should revise content as needed to ensure your milestone report reflects your current work. Similarly, we expect that feedback received throughout this milestone will have been addressed or implemented in this report.

Milestone 2 has focused on planning, conducting, and synthesizing design research to inform design choices you make throughout the rest of the project sequence. In this milestone report, aim to communicate how your design research has provided insights to support your development of a design that effectively addresses your chosen design problem.

This report should have three sections:

Methods and Participants

State your two research questions and briefly explain how you structured your design research to pursuit insight and understanding related to these questions. These questions may be the same as what you submitted in Assignment 2.1, or you may have revised them based on feedback or findings during your design research.

Present an overview of each design research method you employed. Include details about your intended participants and two or more additional relevant details of your method (e.g., how you designed the method to gain insight into your research question).

Provide a brief overview of your participants. For each design research activity you conducted, describe relevant details of the participant. If you employed a group-based method, describe the group of participants. Be careful that names of participants should be replaced with pseudonyms in all documents. It is important to protect participant anonymity, even in the case that reporting seems harmless.

Finally, reflect on the process of conducting your design research. Were there unexpected challenges or opportunities that emerged while conducting your design research? How did the experience differ across participants? If you used multiple methods or updated your method, how did different methods shape your findings?
Design Problem

Revisit the design problem you submitted in your Milestone 1 report. Your framing of the design problem may have evolved during your design research.
- Are there specific portions of the original problem on which you are now more or less focused?
- Did your design research change your understanding of the problem, or surface different related problems? Are you choosing to pursue them?
Use specific feedback, findings, and details from your design research to justify how you have chosen to change or evolve your design problem (e.g., with findings or evidence that support the change or evolution). If you have not decided to pursue such a change or evolution (i.e., your design problem has not changed since Milestone 1), justify that using specific feedback, findings, and details from your design research (e.g., with findings or evidence that support your original design problem).

After completing this reflection, provide your current design problem. Provide enough detail to convince the reader that this is a difficult and interesting problem.

Be careful that you are not yet defining a specific design. Your design problem should remain sufficiently open that it supports exploring multiple related tasks and multiple distinct designs.
Findings and Themes

Present a total of 8 findings that represent the strongest insights you gained through your design research.

For each finding, provide a succinct summary of the finding, complemented by specific evidence from one or more of your design research activities. This evidence might be a quote, a description of a participant's reaction to a question, or any other observation during your design research that explains your finding.

Note this report intentionally asks for fewer findings than you were asked to identify in your design research activities (e.g., in Assignment 2.2). This requires you to identify findings that you think are most compelling for their potential design implications. Be sure to keep a record of your other findings, in case your later consideration of specific designs warrants revisiting those additional findings.

Finally, synthesize two higher-level themes from your design research. Each theme should clearly connect to insights from at least two different design research activities (e.g., include findings or evidence from those activities as part of describing the theme).

For each theme, identify two potential design implications. Does a theme surface relevant tasks on which a design might focus? Does a theme suggests specific characteristics or values on which designs should focus? Are there other notable ways a theme might affect the direction of your project?

Themes are meant to guide your development of designs in future milestones. Ensure they are appropriately high-level, providing direction for your design process while still leaving room to explore different potential designs.

Submission

Due: Monday, October 21, 3:00pm

Within the Drive folder for course project files:

Identify the Slides deck corresponding to this assignment for your group. The deck provides a template for this assignment. Edit the deck in-place, so that you can easily share it in critique.
Prepare a Slides deck with the following structure:

Methods and Participants
- 1 slide: Design research questions.
- For each method you employed:
  - 1 slides: Method overview.
- 1 slide: Participants overview.
- 1 slide: Reflection on design research process.
Revised Design Problem
- 1 slide: Reflection on original design problem.
- 1 slide: Current design problem.
Design Directions
- 4 slides: 8 design research findings (i.e., 2 per slide).
- 2 slides: 2 higher-level themes (i.e., 1 per slide).

Reminders and requirements:

Submission via Canvas is also required, in support of grading.
- Remove instruction slides and template markings from your deck before submission.
- Export a PDF of your deck, via the menu: File -> Download -> PDF Document (.pdf).
This is a group submission. Ensure your section and names of all group participants are appropriately clear.
All group members must submit an individual Contribution Statement for this Milestone.

The Drive folder for course project files is here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Sm12CpuMNsKBqk6E_Ri875hfFs0A-IRS?usp=drive_link

Submit via Canvas here:

https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1746586/assignments/9755342

Grading

This milestone report will be graded on a scale of 28 points:

Design Research Questions: (2 points)

State your two research questions and briefly explain how you structured your design research to pursuit insight and understanding related to these questions.
Method Overview: (2 points)

Present an overview of each design research method you employed.
Participants Overview: (2 points)

Provide a brief overview of your participants.
Design Research Process Reflection: (2 points)

Reflect on the process of conducting your design research.
Design Problem Reflection: (2 points)

Use specific feedback, findings, and details from your design research to justify your current design problem, which may or may not have changed or evolved since Milestone 1.
Current Design Problem: (2 points)

Provide enough detail to convince the reader that this is a difficult and interesting problem.
Design Research Findings: (8 x 1 point)

Present specific findings based on what you heard, learned, or observed.

In support of each finding, provide specific evidence collected in your design research.

Identify findings that you think are most compelling for their potential design implications.
Higher-Level Themes: (2 x 3 points)

Synthesize higher-level themes from your design research.

Clearly connect each theme to insights from at least two different design research activities.

Identify two potential design implications for each theme.
Clarity and Presentation: (2 points)

Prior Samples

Samples are from prior offerings that had different requirements. Samples are also intended only to illustrate a variety of approaches, and were not selected to be ideal or exemplary. These may help to see how prior students approached elements of a project, but be sure to understand and consider requirements and feedback in your own work.