Self-Assessment For Week 1: deemed optional
Self-Assessment For Week 2:
- Things Learned:
- Technical Area: researched information on bioinformatics in general & the bioinformatics pathway at STEM-Away
- Tools: Trello, Discord, Google Drive, Google Search
- Soft Skills: communication
- Three achievement highlights: Set up communication between team members. Presented information to leads & mentors. Planned out interviews
- Goals for the upcoming week: interview 3 people from bioinformatics
- Tasks done: The tasks accomplished this week were the basic ones to start any project, such as getting to know our team members and planning out our work. One hurdle we faced was time zones: Members of my team are scattered between PST, EST, and IST, so it was difficult to have everyone meet at one time. However, over the course of the week, we divided up work so that people in IST have things to work off of those in PST, and vice versa.
Self-Assessment For Week 3:
- Things Learned:
- Technical Area: interviewing STEM-Away bioinformatics interns at all levels in order to ensure the app can be used by a variety of users
- Tools: Trello, Discord, Zoom, Miro, Figma
- Soft Skills: communication
- Three achievement highlights: Interviewed BI people. Presented information to leads & mentors.
- Goals for the upcoming week: Refine journey maps & personas.
- Tasks done: The tasks accomplished this week were the data gathering ones, such as interviewing people from BI. One hurdle we faced was time zones: Members of the BI members we interviewed are scattered between PST, EST, and IST. Since BI’s work schedule is different, finding a time to meet and interview was difficult, especially in order to get it done before our Week 2 presentation. However, the leads were ok with us submitting some interviews later, and the team met together to compile the data we had gathered really well.
Self-Assessment For Week 4:
- Things Learned:
- Technical Area: interviewing STEM-Away bioinformatics interns at all levels in order to ensure the app can be used by a variety of users
- Tools: Discord, Zoom, Miro, Figma
- Soft Skills: interviewing for UX research
- Three achievement highlights: Interviewed BI people. Presented information to leads & mentors. Refined journey maps & personas.
- Goals for the upcoming week: Start building out a design for the prototype in figma
- Tasks done: The tasks accomplished this week were the data gathering ones, such as interviewing people from BI. One hurdle we faced was how closely to align our work with that of the BI team, since we are not coding. However, we found out from our team lead that it was separate, and we still sat in on BI team meetings to see how BI softwares work, so we could make something similar to what they are used to.
Self-Assessment For Week 5:
- Things Learned:
- Technical Area: putting together a wireframe of the app
- Tools: Slack, Discord, Zoom, Figma, Excalidraw
- Soft Skills: communication
- Three achievement highlights: Started work on wireframe. Established relationship w/ BI team. Starting to solidify how we want our app to work.
- Goals for the upcoming week: Finish wireframe so we can start building the lo-fi prototype.
- Tasks done: The tasks accomplished this week were the functional ones, such as establishing a basic layout and functionality for the app. One hurdle we faced was how to display functionality, since, in most BI apps, lots of visuals are not static and adjustable, which are not features we have in Figma. We overcame this hurdle by animating what we could, such as drop downs, as well as coming up with a guide on notes to put in the prototype to show how certain aspects would be animated when coded, which helped when we showed our wireframe to the BI team to see if functionality matches a platform that they would use.
Self-Assessment For Week 6:
- Things Learned:
- Technical Area: finalizing lo-fi prototype for user testing
- Tools: Discord, Zoom, Excalidraw Figma
- Soft Skills: assessment development, interviewing
- Three achievement highlights: Got prototype tested. Overall good reaction to first attempt. Improved our research skills
- Goals for the upcoming week: Refine lo-fi to make hi-fi
- Tasks done: The tasks accomplished this week were the data gathering ones, to see if our functionality is good, which, as we found later after multiple interviews, it was. One issue we faced was how to track functionality, since we cannot sit face-to-face with our testers. At first, we did a google survey. However, we struggled coming up with questions that balanced being open-ended and detailed enough, since, with there being no “gold standard” software in BI, everyone is used to different softwares. So, we decided to hop on a zoom call with our testers, walk them through the app, and note down any comments that they had on the app.
Self-Assessment For Week 7:
- Things Learned:
- Technical Area: turn lo-fi into hi-fi
- Tools: Trello, Discord, Zoom, Figma
- Soft Skills: communication, visual design
- Three achievement highlights: Got input from BI people. Functionality was great, especially given the limited animation abilities in figma. Can move on to Hi-fi
- Goals for the upcoming week: Make app more aesthetically-pleasing & enjoyable to use.
- Tasks done: Across the board, our functionality was good, so there was not much needed to change the essence & core of the app. One issue we had was how to make it more aesthetically pleasing, since most models we looked at of standard BI apps were not aesthetically pleasing at all. So, in our user testing, we made sure to ask our testers how they envision a “fun” app. Additionally, we asked if there were any colors or symbols we should not mess with, since they can throw off a person’s interpretation of what the function of the object is. One BI member was kind enough to send over a site that creates color palettes, and he input some that he imagined would work well on our app.
Self-Assessment For Week 8:
- Things Learned:
- Technical Area: turning the hi-fi into a final product & presentation
- Tools: Discord, Zoom, Miro, Figma
- Soft Skills: communication
- Three achievement highlights: Finished hi-fi. Put into presentation. Overall, well liked by audience in practice.
- Goals for the upcoming week: Refine hi-fi & presentation for actual presentation.
- Tasks done: The app prototype itself. It runs well, and is well-liked by BI people, and our mentors. One hurdle we faced was what to present, because certain aspects are dense, such as journey maps. So, we decided to summarize as best we could, as well as put in images to show how thorough our work was.