Spotmind

The initiation our project is to design something for IDeATe students that might help them in someways in learning. After 6 weeks of research and interviews with students, professors, and staffs from IDeATe, we discovered that there are lots of trouble with student collaboration. We also found out a couple reason for this, according to the student's interview, they reported that sometimes it can be hard to get to know each other since they are from very different majors, having very different takes on design, and have very different background. And all of this can make it hard for students to fully engage during meetings. Also, if meetings are not effcient, then sometime they have to come back and meet again for the same thing that they have met couple days ago, which is a big waste on time. 

  our analysis map after interivew with students and professors

So based on the research and interviews, we narrowed our problem down to: How might we improve the mutual engagement in the meeting of interdisciplinary student group?

Initially, we thought it would be nice to make other acknoledge each others agreement on good points. So we were focusing on recording "thumbs up" button pressed during the meeting. However, during user testing, it turns out that this is more useful for documentation, but not necessarily collaboration. 

  Second prototype user test

So then we pivoted to focusing on gathering attention and track meeting status using a big screen which everyone can see. In the first iteration, we used google slides as a lo-fi prototype, in which the meeting facilitator can display the current topic and make other people focus better during the meeting. And here is my final iteration of our project.

Link for our video presentation:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGWTZGtwN8A&t=6s  

For this project, if we have more time to do more iterations. We are thinking about adding a couple more features in there:

1. Objector: this is a role get randomly assigned to a person in the meeting, who try to object ideas from other people almost all the time in order to incentivise more in-depth discussion. We had this feature in our early prototypes, but the result was not as good as we expected, mainly because the students reported that it can be hard to object people when you don't know each other, it can turn into a really awkward situation really fast.

2. Gamification: we are thinking about adding some more gamified features to incentivise students to use this software more often, and use this to help them track their meeting and be more efficient

3. Documentation: it would be really useful to incorportated documentation into this software directly, however, we need to do some more research among students and see what kind of needs do they have regarding to docuementaion and meetings. 

  We believe our solution will let students discuss in a joint problem-solving space during meetings, especially for problem-based courses. Which means our solution will create a more engaging meeting experience for IDeATe students and positively propel their projects forward  

Many thanks to students, professors, and staffs from CMU IDeATe, it is impossible to finish our project without their help. And thanks to the professor teaching this class (Learning Media Design) for guiding us through the process and gave us valuable suggestions along the way.