Last week was my first week as an intern. I spent most of it learning Laravel from scratch. I also planned my requirements gathering for my project, which would involve 2 focus groups with students and interviews with as many lecturers as possible. These were meant to be done this week.<\/p>\n
My project was going to be a system for asking questions anonymously in lectures, which addresses the intimidation of raising a hand in a lecture to ask a potentially dumb question.<\/p>\n
My first focus group had 3 students from archaeology, English-and-film and computer science respectively. We brought pizza as an incentive for the students to participate.<\/p>\n
We learned the following things:<\/p>\n
The full notes of what they said can be found here<\/a>, and the report (which includes their wireframes) can be found here.<\/a><\/p>\n The second focus group had 4 students all from computer science, all Bulgarians – it was a Bulgarian programmer pizza party.<\/p>\n They provided the following extra information:<\/p>\n Full notes of focus group 2<\/a>,\u00a0report of focus group 2<\/a><\/p>\n It had been said to me by some students that an app similar to what I’m planning to make is already available on the MySouthampton app, called Meetoo. I kept that in the back of my mind with the intention of researching it later.<\/p>\n Well, maybe I should have researched it earlier because once I looked into it, I discovered that it had 90% of the main features people asked me about:<\/p>\n They even had a video on YouTube of Southampton students praising the app! Ugh!<\/p>\n With this in mind, I went to do my lecturer interviews with a somewhat reduced level of confidence.<\/p>\n It’s not that I didn’t try to find any lecturers from outside of ECS – the 6 lecturers that I emailed just didn’t reply to me. I don’t blame them – they have no connection to this so they probably wouldn’t prioritise it over other tasks etc.<\/p>\n I interviewed 3 lecturers from ECS – Nick Gibbins, Kirk Martinez and Klaus-Peter Zauner. I showed them wireframes for 3 different ideas for systems:<\/p>\n All wireframes of the system can be found in the report linked at the end of this section.<\/p>\n The opinions were pretty consistent and can be summarised to this:<\/p>\n I could not get a definitive answer of whether System 2 is worth implementing, but the general opinion of it was positive.<\/p>\nFocus Group 2<\/h2>\n
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Discovering that an app like this already exists<\/h1>\n
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Interviews – gathering opinions from lecturers<\/h1>\n
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