Assignment 2

In Advanced HCI, which I took last semester, my group had particularly difficult-to-coordinate schedules, and our schedules always clashed. Ultimately, we were forced to meet on weekends, but before that, we tried to arrange discussions online - something we did only once, because of various problems. Each member had their part in the group, due to specializations (such as the Communications major being good with pitches, the Computer Science major being good with technical details, etc.)

The HCI course was a collaboration course geared towards producing a design of a useful product by the end of the semester. Its class composition was varied, and though our group had three IS majors, one CS major and one COMM major, we still had a varied set of skills and experience: basically, our inputs. Other than the Communications/Computer Science major mentioned, the Information Science majors also had different skill sets. One had a design background, one a theoretical background, and the other a mix of both. This made allotment of work easier – we knew exactly who to give the Photoshop job, the pitch job, the theoretical rationale job, etc.

As mentioned, due to time conflicts, interactions took the form of FtF meetings, and sometimes through email or messages left on Google Docs, which was the collaboration technology we used. Emails and messages on shared documents were means of leaving ‘post-it’ notes to each other (remember to do this, you missed this, I changed this, etc.) FtF meetings were where we actually hashed out our plan of what to do, before we could split up and tackle our own jobs, since our roles were well defined thanks to our skills.

Our output was a study/paper prototype of a new bookmarking system that would better facilitate Internet users’ needs, including statistics and analysis about normal bookmarking usage for a college-age student. Group maintenance is probably where our project fell a little flat. If asked, the group members would opt to work with a team that better fit their own time restraints, because though we got along, the clashing schedules made coordinating difficult, resulting in overlap or holes in our arguments at times. Communication was slow, and not always accurate. This was the strain of not being able to work FtF all the time. When I participated in an Introductory HCI class with a group in the same manner, our frequent meetings during the week made things progress smoother.