Evaluating "Sketchy" Ideas, Part 1: Expert Feedback

Last week I met with a few in-house experts (i.e., members of the Future Workspaces team) here at Novay and asked them to give feedback on some "sketchy" concept ideas.

I went to them with six rough ideas for solutions to keeping mobile workers -- specifically the "Traditionalists", as I've come to refer to them -- in sync and in touch. I showed them a series of sketches illustrating each concept.

A very brief description of each of these follows:

1. Ping

Location-based awareness of colleagues that does not require the use of a GPS-enabled smartphone* to work. It helps mobile professionals check to see when their geographically-distributed colleagues are nearby so that they can then contact one another for an ad hoc, face-to-face meeting.

2. Bulletin Board

A means of sharing status updates, short messages, and multimedia that is filterable by group (e.g., "Project Team", "Department", or "Organization"). The application would act as a sort of dynamically updating desktop wallpaper.

3. Daily Outlook

An add-on for Outlook that configures the Outlook Today page and is meant to support the sharing of: 1. Status updates; (2) News Flashes; (3) Document sharing (via the use of links); and (4) a Q&A section (basically, a bare bones forum).

4. Outlook-based Blogging Tool

An add-on for Outlook that makes it easy to post to blogs as well as track, read and share blog posts from within Outlook (all without having to open a web browser).

5. Free Five

Personnel within a company are matched based on mutual professional interests. Individuals can make available "five minutes" (or more) of free time to meet with previously unknown colleagues, thus earning points. Earned points can be traded in a type of bartering system that allows participants to "buy" time slots from one another. The basic idea is to foster the making of new connections within large, decentralized organizations; help find experts; and, open new opportunities for collaboration.

6. Hover Status

By hovering over the name of a colleague -- for example, when composing a new email message -- a small window appears that displays that contact's latest status update (e.g., as fed from their calendar). This information can be used to help one decide which method is best for contacting an individual at that moment -- be it email, phone, or face-to-face communication.

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While they were evaluating the concepts, I asked the participants to keep in mind the six design requirements (as outlined in a previous post). As a reminder of those requirements, I printed off some A4-sized cards listing the requirements and gave one to each participant. That way they could easily refer to the requirements -- and assess the extent to which each concept idea addressed them -- as they gave their feedback.

For each concept, participants were asked to give three pros, three cons, and three improvements for furthering the design. I used this feedback as the basis for a second design iteration (I plan to share some of this feedback in future posts). Then, I had them rank order each concept. Each first place ranking was given a score of six points, a second place ranking was given a score of five, and so on.

The outcome of the rank ordering is as follows:
1. Ping - 20 points
2. Hover Status - 18 points
3. Daily Outlook - 16 points
4. Bulletin Board - 14 points
5. Outlook Blogging Tool - 11 points
6. Free Five - 6 points

I used the feedback and rank orderings to modify the top four concepts. The following week I held a focus group with users. There I presented the Ping and Hover Status concepts, along with a new concept (which also came out of the expert assessment) -- an easy status updater that sits on the desktop. The Bulletin Board and Daily Outlook concepts were rolled into a single idea.

In the next post, I'll share more about this focus group.

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*I realize in the example here I've actually drawn a smartphone. That's simply a function of the fact that they are easier to draw (e.g., fewer buttons, paired with a nice big display!) As an aside: Although smartphone sales are on the rise -- according to a recent report, despite the fact that there has been a sharp increase in the number of smartphones sold -- they still only make up approximately 13.5% of the mobile phone market. And these numbers are reflective of the mobile professionals I talked to -- that is, the majority of them didn't own smartphones.