Hello and welcome back. We've been talking a lot about how to get ideas, how to select the best ideas from a list. But really, the only way to learn this is by doing this, and that's why we have an assignment on ideation and selection for you. So, in this video, I'll just be briefly describing this assignment and giving you a few tips for succeeding on it. So, here are the assignment components, we're going to provide you with some formative user research. This happens to be an actual research paper that our group wrote and this research is on how work-separated families use technology. So, work-separated families are ones where a parent may travel for work or for studying and the kids are left somewhere else. So, you're going to read through this paper, and you're going to ideate. You're actually going to do ideation to come up with a hundred ideas for technology that can help these families. Then, you're going to select five ideas and elucidate these ideas as paragraph-long use cases or similar descriptions. So, just one paragraph about each idea describing it. If you're feeling ambitious, you can also provide sketches, there is no extra credit for this. I always enjoy seeing students sketches, so if you're feeling up to it, definitely include those as well. But you're really being graded on that paragraph-long description. And you will be asked to comment on other users, other students ideas as well, so just make sure to leave some time to do that peer grading. All right, so a few tips for succeeding in this assignment. You're going to have to come up with a hundred ideas, which may seem like a lot. What I enjoyed doing is giving myself a time limit so if something like I'm going to sit down for an hour and I'm going to come up with these ideas. Rather than kind of writing down a few good ideas then agonizing over and over the next few days, writing down a few other good ideas. It's important that, at this stage, you don't actually critique your ideas, judge them in any way, or limit them. Even if an idea seems ridiculous, even if the technology you invented to help connect parents and kids is a teleportation platform. And you don't think that's actually technologically feasible, it doesn't matter, write it down. It's about the quantity of ideas, not necessarily about the specific quality of them. You're going to get two points per idea on this assignment, so up to 50 points. So, no matter how good or bad an idea is, you're going to get a point for it. So, the key is, limit your time, try to think crazy, try to think wild, try to think of a lot of different ideas. And don't critique yourself at this part of the process. Now, once you get your idea selection from over a hundred ideas, you actually just need to pick five ideas that are, that you want to provide us with more detail on. And so you can combine and cluster your big idea list and there's a video lecture helping you figure out how to do that. I want you to pick five diverse ideas and this is key so if you have an idea that's, it's an app that let's a kid send photos to their parent. And if you have another idea that's like, it's an app that let's a kid send photos with filters to their parent. Those are a bit too similar, I would either combine those two ideas or only use one of them. And use something a little bit more different for a different idea. And the other thing is at this stage, you can do a little bit critique and judgement of your own ideas. And make sure they're actually consistent with the findings of that formative user research study that you read. So, if that user research study says kids aren't going to be motivated to initiate a phone call. And your idea is a special phone that only kids can use to call their parents. Then maybe that's not actually consistent with the findings of the study. So, just something to, as you're going through it, being critical of your own ideas and trying to connect them back to that formative research. And then a few tips for writing the idea, so I think, find it's helpful to name each idea. You can easily refer to it in the paragraph then, and it's kind of it has a name in your mind, which I think is nice. Describe each idea briefly in one paragraph, maybe give an example of how does a work-separate family may use this technology. You can name hypothetical people that would use it and the key is that it doesn't need to solve the problem a 100%. So maybe you design a technology that's really focused more on the parent that's staying back at home with the child. Because they a lot of responsibilities and actually connecting them with their remote parent. And that's fine, it's fine it it's focusing on a specific stakeholder or solving some component of the problem but not trying to solve everything at once. But do consider how does the formative research relates to this idea, how does it inform or inspires idea. So, just of give you a concrete example, so maybe after reading the paper, I would have an idea about this ePet recorders. So, the way I would write it up is this way, so I would name it ePet recorders. In this case, I'm going to use a hypothetical family, so Bobby's dad, Richard, is traveling for work for a whole month. Like many other parent, Richard struggles with staying aware of Bobby's everyday life. And so this is actually making a reference directly to the formative work of parents. Where traveling struggles staying aware of the life of the children back home. To help solve this issue, Bobby has several pocket size and wearable toy pets with built-in sensors. These let Bobby share recordings such as audio messages, photos, etc of his day as he plays with his toys. Now, this doesn't need to be a perfect idea so, for example, somebody may critique. And say well, we know that kids aren't very motivated to stay connected with parents who are traveling. So, how are these toys actually going to help build that motivation on Bobby's part? So, would be a fair critique of this, I didn't actually address that in the statement, but I did connect it back to formative research. I did describe vaguely what it does, I even provided a sketch here, which is optional. And that's basically what we're all were asking you to do for each of your ideas, so a few notes on grading. So, this is going to be fairly loosely graded and I do as you are grading your fellow students' assignments. I do want you to have kind of a bit more of a loose grading structure on this, a bit more benefit of the doubt. So, the first 50 points just come up from coming up with those a hundred ideas. So, you get two points per idea regardless of quality, instability just a counting exercise. And then for each of the five ideas that you list the date on, it's ten points each. You get four points for just clearly describing it in a paragraph. You get three points from the fact that it actually relates to the user research. So, it's not the idea is something completely unrelated, so suddenly we're talking about how to help software engineers write code. That's not a related idea to help, how to help parents to connect with kids. And the other thing is that it needs to be different from the other four ideas. So, try to be as diverse as you can, don't have five examples of photo sharing apps, that's probably not different enough from each other. And there's also a little bit of double jeopardy on that one because if you have two ideas that are identical. You're losing three points on each of these ideas for if not being different from the other four ideas. So, I think that diversity and picking out interesting diverse ideas is actually key part of this assignment. So, there's a few relevant lectures that you may want to review before you start the assignment. The key ones are definitely the ideation video, which helps you come up with lots of ideas. And the idea selection video which gives you some idea about how you might actually go about taking your hundred ideas. And getting them down to the five that you're going to describe. The used cases video may be relevant as a good way of describing in a short paragraph, how a specific technology may function. And the communicating ideas to stakeholders video also talks a little bit about things like user scenarios and sketches as well. So, hopefully this gives you enough to get started, I really look forward to seeing the kinds of ideas you come up with. And I hope you enjoy reading your paper, it was one of my favorite papers to write. Thank you, bye. [SOUND]
