Design process overview
The design process that we will be following in this course consists of seven activities. Most of these activities bear upon each other; for example, doing user research, part of the learning activity, affects the envisioning activity and the creation of user personas and scenarios.
Conversely, however, the envisioning activity may inspire additional learning requirements, such as getting a more complete sense of the collection’s subject focus, which may cause you to sharpen your position on the subject, which may affect your own rhetorical goals, which may in turn affect your scenarios and how you envision the collection experience...you see where I’m going with this.
The following diagram illustrates the relationship between activities:
Process activity summary
Activity name Description
Preliminary reflection A meditation on your goals and assumptions for the project.
Learning User research, getting more familiar with the subject area (and, indeed, coming to your own “theory” of what the subject encompasses), and looking through the source library from which you will select the video resources for your collection.
Envisioning
Strategizing
Creating user personas and scenarios for how members of your potential audience would interact with the collection (which of course doesn’t exist yet!).
Defining your goals and your audience’s goals, and determining how the collection, through its composition, structure, and means of access, will facilitate the goals.
Associated design products
Personas and scenarios
Design brief
INF 385 U, Digital Media Collections Spring 2010

Activity name Description
Sketching Showing how the envisioned experience and strategy might take form.
Reflecting, revisiting, and refining
Returning to the different activities as each reveals more about how the design will work.
Analysis and critique Rigorously and systematically examining your prototype to identify problems and improvements.
Associated design products
Sketch (using open video toolkit)
All three products TOGETHER make up your design prototype. Each document supplements and reinforces the others. If creating the brief alters your idea of what the collection experience looks like, you change the scenario. If trying things out in the open video toolkit makes it clear that a strategy articulated in the brief won’t work, you change the brief (and potentially the scenarios, and potentially your personas and your idea of who the target audience is...again, you get where
I’m going with this). This process of going back and forth and continually asking oneself how all of these activities, documents, ideas, etc. fit together is supposed to help us engage in an ongoing dialogue with our design situation (a la Fallman).
INF 385 U, Digital Media Collections Spring 2010