Interoffice Memorandum

To: Krista Kennedy

From: Meredith Neumann, David Bray, and Mary Gaffney

Date: March 28, 2008

Subject: Design Memo

Forming our design team

After forming our design team, our first endeavor was to discuss our strengths and weaknesses in order to designate roles.  David shared that he was an architecture student, loved working with design and visuals, and had spent the majority of his childhood playing with LEGOS. Meredith shared that her strengths were in writing as well as paying attention to details while keeping the big picture in mind. Mary said she liked to take photographs and was open to all parts of the design process. David offered his experience with the design program Google SketchUp to produce our illustrations. Although we planned to collaborate heavily, our designation of roles were as follows: David was put in charge of the design and illustrations, Meredith controlled the written portions and the editing, and Mary developed the usability testing and wrote the usability reports and analyses. We were quite pleased with the assignment of roles and felt they were equally distributed.

Coming up with a design

We initiated the design process by dumping a pile of LEGOS onto the floor and beginning to build without an end product in mind. Meredith shared pictures from LEGOLAND in Denmark for inspiration. Our design objective was simple: to create a product that would cause users to smile upon completion of its construction. David eventually suggested building an elephant and we decided to try it. By the end of our initial design focus group, we came up with a prototype of our final product, which we named Joseph the Technicolor Elephant. Upon completion of our prototype, we were confident in our accomplishment of our initial design objective; however, we realized we would need to make further modifications to our design. Prior to concluding our first meeting, we came up with the following additional objectives: to simplify the design, use less pieces, separate the design into four modules, and color coordinate the modules for straightforward construction.

Moving forward

Meredith and David met to revise the design for Joseph so that it would meet our additional design objectives. We streamlined the design, used less pieces, divided the design into four modules, and color blocked those modules. Meanwhile, Mary worked on developing a method for the usability testing of our product. The three of us met to update each other on our progress, get feedback on our respective sections, and delegate what had to be finished for our in-class usability-testing day.

After Usability Testing Day

For the first day of in-class usability testing, we came with a completed first draft of our written and illustrated instructions. We received a lot of useful feedback about our design and instructions from the day’s users. Working from the feedback we received, our team met once again to improve our design. We decided to reconstruct the body of the elephant to make it more structurally sound and reworded our instructions in preparation for the second day of usability testing.

The Homestretch 

After receiving additional feedback from the second day of in-class usability testing, we decided to allocate the remaining project tasks. Mary took charge of writing a report of the testing and revision procedure, Meredith wrote the introductory page, the team bio page, and the design memo, and David took charge of the website layout and graphics.