This section of the school revisits the ground we covered in the first three days and suggests some useful tools for putting in practice what the students learned. As though in a timelapse, we will step through the various phases of bringing innovative solutions to life: understanding the state of the art and identifying gaps where innovative solutions are possible; surveying and polling large populations of experts, prospective users and beneficiaries of our solutions as well as lay people exploiting the wisdom of the crowds; creating personas to understand the needs of the prospective users and beneficiaries of our solution; and finally prototyping and realizing proof of concepts to test and evaluate our solutions before committing to industrializing its development. It's very important to note that these phases are iterative and not just stages of a linear "waterfall" project.
Literature review
We start from learning how to carry out a thorough survey study on the domain at hand: understand where the state of the art is at, reviewing relevant literature and organize it by complexity, partitioning the research space and if necessary taking an historical perspective. Whatever the research or innovation endeavor, we must know the state of the art so that we can then identify gaps and ask important questions aimed at filling those gaps with innovative and inventive work.
Surveys and polls
Then we look at tools for carrying out surveys and questionnaires by reaching large audiences. With practical examples, we see how to structure such reviews for zeroing in on the important questions we are asking and analyzing responses. We'll learn how to create and distribute a survey and analyze its results with Google Forms, and we'll briefly look at alternatives such as SurveyMonkey.
Personas
Having identified the problem on which to concentrate following a thorough review of the state of the art in the relevant academic literature and refined our hypothesis through a survey helping us to ask genuinely open questions, we then get acquainted with the (classes of) users of our innovative solution. We do that by creating personas. A useful template to do so (credit: JISC UK) will be shared with the participant of the groups. We use personas to get much stronger clarity on the needs and wants that our solution addresses.
Rapid prototyping and proof of concept realization
Rapid prototyping is the next essential phase in the realization of our solution. Prototyping is important because it's a way of testing and asking questions before we commit to a fully developed and functional solutions. We will look at tools like Moqups and Balsamiq for wireframing solutions, and at the Invision Design Platform - or its alternatives like Axure - for realizing high fidelity proof of concept of the user experience (UX) aspects of our solution.
Useful links
Google Forms - https://www.google.com/forms/about/
SurveyMonkey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/
Persona Google Docs Template - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ru70lzH1uFyDSlDDgg46Vd-LNJWXMntzK1IHtDc7jOg/edit
Good practices in survey research- http://intqhc.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/3/261
Moqups - https://moqups.com/
Balsamiq - https://balsamiq.com/
Invision Design Platform - http://www.invisionapp.com/
Axure - http://www.axure.com/
Example form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1nXjI3QdwEMV-6p0A_PwfPOm3ZZQ8gOR7Qo6GCpqJuWs/viewform?c=0&w=1&usp=mail_form_link