Professional skills - Project Organisation,
communication and reporting, exploratory research

Why:

For our project on creating a recipe website, we developed a project plan to clearly identify potential challenges and organize our planning and task division effectively. This plan served as a reference point, helping us stay on track and providing guidance whenever we faced roadblocks.

How:

We developed the project plan through collaborative group discussions, dedicating a week to carefully consider what should be included and how the project would be executed. After every phase we did retrospectives to see what was going well, what we should do differently and what we should stop doing.

What:

We first went through all the key components like the target group, current situation, problem description, project goal, and many more. We discussed all these subjects thoroughly until everyone in the group had said their part and agreed to what was written down. In the project plan we also divided the project in 3 phases, namely the research, the design, and the implementation phase. In the research phase I did a few interviews and came up with some of the questions for the surveys and interviews and in the other two phases everyone’s works was split evenly so we all had to create 3 pages for the website. We also made sure to set some rules in our team charter to keep everyone’s actions in order. Regular check-ins helped us stay on track, and we adjusted the plan as needed when new challenges arose. This allowed us to stay organized and quickly resolve any issues, ensuring the project progressed smoothly.

Reflection:

The way we organized our project was highly effective, as I rarely found myself so off track that I couldn’t figure out how to move forward. However, I wish we had conducted more group retrospectives, as we stopped doing them later on, which led to some confusion and disorganization.

Why:

I had a workshop about how to conduct a user study as well as what research methods there are and how to use them. In this workshop we went over the main methods of research which were surveys, interviews, and observations and what their strengths and weaknesses are and how to conduct them properly. We were then put into groups and given the assignment to make a small user research using at least 2 of the research methods.

How:

The exact objective of the assignment was to think of a way to make the process of booking rooms at Fontys easier. To do this me and my group started brainstorming questions for a survey and interview. Once we were done, we went to interview one of our teachers, where my groupmate did the interview, and I noted down the responses. After the interview we got feedback and were told that there were many things we needed to improve on, for example I needed to introduce myself before starting, which I didn’t do. After this I sent the survey to one of the teachers which didn’t work and I was also told that for this specific task a survey isn’t useful, as it’s meant for getting general information from a large group of people. The teacher advised us to do an observation instead, which we then did. We asked one of the teachers to show us how they book a room.

What:

After our user study we gained insightful information about the problems that arise when booking a room at Fontys. One of the issues was that you must physically go to the room to check if it is available or not. However, the main issue was that there is a huge lack of information when booking a room, we as a group concluded that if the information could be provided the issue would be solved.

Reflection:

The workshop was extremely useful, and I learned a lot. Mainly the situations where you use the certain research methods were good to know, especially because we had a user study coming up for our group project.