Further development, reflection and summary of ideas

Hello folks and welcome to our last blogpost! Oh how time has gone so fast. But in this last post we will think our further product development plan, so what could we done next if we had time and resources. Also, we will reflect our team assignment and teamwork a bit. Lastly, we will gather all the ideas we had for Solita, which are more non-technical and easy approaches to boost the knowledge sharing in and between projects.

Further development

So, in this course, the main point was to design a human-centered product development project, which is the phase 0 in picture below. Also, to accomplish that, phase -1 was done.

Figure 1. Product development phases (Modified from Buxton 2007, according to Varsaluoma 2021)

In this design phase we have planned the human-centered design process where we have tried our best to understand and specify the context of use, specify the user requirements, produce design solutions to meet user requirements and evaluate the designs against requirements (Suomen Standardisoimisliitto 2019). Because of the limit of resources, we have not done this iteratively, but to continue this process, iterations would be needed for designed solution which meets user requirements (Suomen Standardisoimisliitto 2019). For example, while testing the prototype (see the previous post), we should develop the prototype against the feedback we got. Also, while creating the first MVP and prototype, we left out the course-functionality but that should be tested to find out is it needed to take in use already or maybe later in the product development. Also, in developing the user interface in our product and prototype, we should take the ISO 9241-11 standard (Suomen Standardoimisliitto 2018) into account more thoroughly to ensure the usability of our product. Also, we think that also the ISO 9241-920 (Suomen Standardoimisliitto 2016) would be helpful to create tactile and haptic interactions.

So, after the design phase is done, as we have done in this course, the next steps would be in engineering and sales. In engineering, we would need to fully create the platform planned in this design-process. In this case, I think Solita would be ready to create the platform technically, because it would be for them to use and they indeed are a software house. So, the last phase, sales, wouldn’t be our thing to consider, because the project is made already to a customer. But it could be possible to later sell this product to someone else by us or by Solita, on terms how would our contract bend. So, to sum up, if we hand time and resources to develop this project further, we would do some iterations in design phase, and then move to engineering phase.

Reflection of team assignment and teamwork

So, the learning goals for this course was to learn about the whole lifecycle of product development and some parts of the lifecycle in interactive product development. Also, other learning goals was to identify and apply human-centered methods for different situations and phases of product development, plan the user experience work in development project and to utilize different sources of information to support human-centered product development. Lastly, huge part of the learning goals was to learn and evaluate working together in a cross-functional team. (Varsaluoma 2021)

As a group we functioned well, and our teamwork was fluent. In the middle of the course, we got a new member to our team which of course gave some extra work to us because we needed to create new rules and ways how to work as a team. We all think that we should have used more time in agreeing new was to work as a new group, but even though we didn’t, we managed to complete the assignment well. We think that it would have been easier to work with the original team, but it is also possible in work life, that your team changes in the middle of the project, so this was a good learning point to all of us. Also, the new member gave us more cross-functional benefits because other members were all from the same field of study, but the new ideas came a bit late to considering the assignment and its schedule.

In addition to teamwork, we think that all the learning goals of the course were completed together as a team. We created the assignment together, so we all learned a lot. We conducted interviews together which we think was also a huge learning point for us, because you can’t practice the interview situations too much. Also, our contact from Solita was helpful and he had a lot of experience in human-centered product development, which made it nice to work with Solita. Although, it was hard sometimes to think how to answer to Solita’s needs with something that could be developed with human-centered development process, we think we managed to combine the courses requirements to Solita’s needs and in the third last post we established more how to combine our platform with future technologies like AI.

As we have told in the end of almost every post, our contribution as a team has been almost equal to others. Eveliina, Eerika, Asta and Sonja has been accountable for the blog and because Kirsi jumped in in the middle of the process, Kirsi has helped and contributed to teamwork a bit differently, and she for example was in charge of our interactive prototype, which we all of course gave our ideas and opinions. So, we divided the contribution points as follows: Eveliina 4 / Eerika 4 / Asta 4 / Sonja 4 / Kirsi 4. 

Other ideas created for Solita

In the beginning of the course, we clarified the Solita’s needs for knowledge boosting a bit more and tried to learn how they work and which kind of an organizational culture they have. Soon we noticed, that culturally Solita and its employees really try and want to share knowledge and skills with each other, but maybe they don’t have the right tools and structures to do that. They don’t want to have too strict processes and they don’t for example have policies how to document information inside organization about projects. In addition to that, the term project is also not established well in Solita. So, to improve the documentation about projects we presented our platform by our MVP and prototype, but we also though some other ideas to boost knowledge sharing in and between projects.

Our most lovable idea is to regularly reward the best knowledge sharer in teams for example with customized chocolate. To evolve this idea, Solita could have a system where you could collect points on knowledge sharing (this could be combined to our platform, e.g., adding or updating project information gives you points), and when you have collected a specific amount of points, you could pick up an e-book or movie-ticket for you. This system of course needs policies and further developing it, but it was one idea. Also, in our opinion, there needs to be some policies on how to document or how to go through the “lessons learned” with each project. Could there be some final meetings after projects where the project team could go through the lessons learned and possibly share that information further? That could be added to mandatory post-project documentation for example. Also, regular internal meetings in project teams to check how things are going. Also, regarding new technologies, there could be trainings or platform where you can boost your knowledge with new things. Some of these ideas needs that Solita develops it’s way of working a bit, and clarifies what they mean with a project, who are involved in a project team and which responsibilities everyone has in a project.

Thank you for all who has followed our whole journey in this course! 

- Knowledge Boosting Diamonds

Suomen Standardisoimisliitto, (2016). Ergonomics of human-system interaction. Part 920: Guidance on tactile and haptic interactions. SFS/ICS ISO 9241-920.

Suomen Standardisoimisliitto, (2018). Ergonomics of human-system interaction. Part 11: Usability: Definitions and concepts. SFS/ICS ISO 9241-11.

Suomen Standardisoimisliitto, (2019). Ergonomics of human-system interaction. Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems. SFS/ICS ISO 9241-210.

Varsaluoma, J. (2021). HTI.230 Human-Centered Product Development Spring 2021. Introduction 12.1.2021. Tampere University. Available: https://moodle.tuni.fi/pluginfile.php/1357544/mod_resource/content/0/HCPRO_2021_Introduction_lecture.pdf (accessed 24.6.2021).