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.
User research, getting more familiar with the
subject area (and, indeed, coming to your
own “theory” of what the subject
encompasses), and compiling the source
library from which you will select the video
resources for your collection.
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
Design brief.
goals, and determining how the collection,
through its composition, structure, and means
of access, will facilitate the goals.
Learning
Envisioning
Strategizing
INF 385U, Digital Media Collections
Associated design
products
Written page to share
with peers.
User research
interviews, subject
research notes,
selected video files,
questions for
audience focus group.
Personas and
scenarios.
Spring 2011
Activity name
Description
Sketching
Showing how the envisioned experience and
strategy might take form.
Reflecting, revisiting,
and refining
Analysis and critique
Returning to the different activities as each
reveals more about how the design will work.
Rigorously and systematically examining
your prototype to identify problems and
improvements.
Associated design
products
Sketch (initially on
paper, and then using
open video toolkit).
The scenarios, brief, and sketches 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, one of
the readings for our second week).
INF 385U, Digital Media Collections
Spring 2011