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TDDD75 Effects-Driven Development and Human-Centred Design of Interactive Systems

Assignment 1 What Is and What If?


The mandatory parts must be performed to receive grade 3 on the assignment, and the optional parts are performed for the possibility to receive grade 4 or 5. The work is graded on how well the different methods are performed and integrated, and how well your choices are motivated and reflected upon.

Mandatory parts

Task: Choose an interactive system (application or service) used by students and/or employees at the university, and re-invent it to meet the goals of both users and other stakeholders, while also responding to changes in student population and university conditions over the next ten years. Make sure to meet both challenges and opportunities. This assignement includes the what-is-part and beginning of the what-if-part of Liedtka's and Ogilve's process outline.

Procedure:Work is performed in assigned groups of maximum six students. Break down the assignment into activities and make a time budget with about 40 hours of work per group member. If you note that a group member is not able to contribute to the group work, then you should contact the examiner as soon as possible. The following activities should be conducted by the book (Liedtka & Ogilve, 2010; Adzic, 2012), but adapted wisely to your specific circumstances:

  1. Visualization and Journey Mapping
  2. Value and Impact Mapping
  3. Brainstorming and Concept Development

Please note that one or several of these activities must include research with planning, recruitment of participants (users and stakeholders), gathering of data, and analysis of for example interviews, observations, workshops, and online material. You also need to budget time for preparation of presentation material.

It is a good idea to structure activities so that you switch back and fourth between individual work and group work, e.g. start in full group to coordinate, then work individually or in pairs, still having short regular meetings with the full group to fine-tune plans and catch any problems in the subgroups and then reconvene the full group to synthesize and prepare the next part.

Deadline: The deadline of the mandatory parts is at the first presentation session. Deliverables are handed in a PDF on Lisam after the presentation session.

The deliverables for Assignment 1 are:

  1. The design presentation (see below)
  2. Design brief (see Liedtka & Ogilve, 2010)
  3. Design criteria (see Liedtka & Ogilve, 2010)
  4. Reflection (see below)

Reflection: Organize a group discussion around the following two questions (document your discussion in a 1-2 page protocol):

  • How have you in the what-is and what-if of your human-centred design thinking project identified and defined the value or the values in use for the chosen interactive system?
  • How have you identified and defined measurable effect or impact goals for an interactive system?

Also include a comment in the reflection that declares if someone has not been able to contribute in major activities or participate in group meetings. State how that person has or will compensate for this. If no compensation could be agreed on, the particular student has to immediately make an arrangement with the supervisor in order to receive a grade on the assignment.

Design presentation: Make a visual 10 minutes presentation (no bullet lists) of both your process and results for the presentation session. Focus on showing what you have done and why, rather than only telling about it. Include the methods you have used, how you have adapted them to your circumstances, and what they resulted in.

The presentation is mandatory, but there are a few valid reasons for missing a presentation. The supplementary task is specified on the Examination page of this homepage. Deadlines for re-submissions apply.

Optional parts

For Grade 4: Complete two of the four exercises below. They should be well performed, described in sufficient detail, and analyzed with references to the course literature.

For Grade 5: Complete all four of the exercises below. They should be well performed, described in sufficient detail, and analyzed with references to the course literature, and reach clearly stated conclusions.

There are headings in Liedtka and Ogilve (2010) called "Try This at Home". For Assignment 1 find these headings for Visualization (pp. 59-60), Journey Mapping (pp. 72-73), Mind Mapping (pp. 88-90), and Brainstorming (p. 111). Read and perform the exercises in the book, with the following modifications that have been made in order to fit the course:

  1. Visualization: Draw the storyboard about any important event in your life that you shared with someone else (note that you really need to contact this person).
  2. Journey Mapping: Make a journey map of any everyday process that involves not only yourself, but also other people.
  3. Mind Mapping: No modifications needed for this exercise.
  4. Brainstorming: Consider professional development that is not covered by the courses you take. Note that this is connected to the concept development exercise in Assignment 2.

Report: Write a report covering the exercices you have chosen to do. Every exercise should be reported using no more than (approx.) 1000 words and using the following headlines:

  1. Procedure and results: Describe in sufficient detail (so that a reader external to the course could understand it) what you did, what happened in the exercise, and what the results were without any evaluation or analysis of it. When appropriate, use figures and photos to illustrate the procedure and results.
  2. Reactions: What were your reactions and thoughts during the exercise (still without any evaluation or analysis)?
  3. Evaluation: What was good or bad about your work, and why was it good or bad? Use references to the course literature when appropriate.
  4. Analysis: Why did you do it the way you did? Why did that make it good or bad? How come? How should you do instead? Use references to the course literature.
  5. General conclusions: What general conclusions can you make based on your experiences and analysis? How could you in the general case make sure that undesirable things do not happen again and desirable things happen every time. Are there alternative approaches that potentially give better results, and if so, why? Use references to the course literature.
  6. Personal conclusions: What concrete conclusions can you personally draw? What are the lessons learned and how would you act in similar situations in the future? How can you make use of your experiences?

Deadline and submission: The deadline for the optional parts are at the end of the course. The report is handed in a PDF on Lisam.

Additional notes: For examples of impact maps you can also do an image googling of the Swedish word "effektkarta". The first hit is probably one from InUse called Bluegarden. That map shows that you can have a compex goal at the center of the map, in contrast to Adzic simple main goal. In the Bluegarden impact map there are four subgoals.


Page responsible: Johan Blomkvist
Last updated: 2020-01-17