F26 CS 449 / 649 Challenge Activities CH1 - CH2
CH1. Challenge Report
Challenge Report Notes (Weeks 5 - 8)
The challenge report (due in Week 8) documents how your team has challenged your assumptions over several weeks. To build up to that, record some notes about how you have challenged your assumptions after each PO1a interview.
- What assumptions did you make?
- What interview questions did you create or what information search did you do to test these assumptions? What did you learn?
- What are your new assumptions?
- How did you refine your interview questions to test these new assumptions? Be specific, and describe the concrete actions your team took to test assumptions.
Add these notes to your design notebook after each PO1a interview.
Challenge Report Deliverable (due Week 8)
Complete the challenge report in your design notebook. In the challenge report, list three assumptions that your team managed to break that were particularly surprising, and the methods/strategies you used to break these assumptions.
- Describe each assumption, including the rationale behind the assumption (i.e., the concrete evidence that caused you to have this assumption in the first place), how you challenged the assumption (i.e., the specific methods and strategies that you used to test the assumption), the insights you gained from testing the assumption (i.e., your findings), and new assumptions that followed from those insights.
- In discussing methods/strategies for testing assumptions, be specific and concrete. Don't just say "we did interviews" or "we did evaluations". Of course, we know that you have done interviews and evaluations!
Tell us a story about how you managed to find the right strategies to test your assumptions, and the challenges or doubts you encountered along the way. The goal is to make the report interesting and something that other students can benefit learning from. Your challenge report will be graded based on this rubric.
CH2. Challenge Presentation
During the challenge report presentation (Week 7), two people from each team will together give a short presentation (~5 mins total) to describe their challenge report. The rest of the class should engage in a discussion, by asking questions, giving feedback or sharing their own experiences (~2 - 3 mins). The presentation must be at most 5 slides:
- Slide 1: Start by describing the motivation for your project
- Slide 2: Describe of the core features of your app / service / experience
- Slides 3-4: Describe the three most surprising assumptions that your team managed to break over the last few weeks and the concrete strategies / methods you used to break these assumptions
- Slide 5: What did you learn? What are some doubt you still have about the project's direction? Make your presentation engaging! For example, you should add lots of visuals and include interesting anecdotes about how your discoveries happened.
Share a link to a Google Slides presentation slides with your TA via your Teams channel as well as in your design notebook in the "P7: Prepare for Next Studio" section at 12pm the day before the Week 7 studio. Apart from the requirement that your presentation be at most slides and the slide-by-slide guidance listed above, there is no slide template.