Collaborative work. This assignment involves a step for which we particularly encourage (but do not require) collaboration. So before you start, we recommend you find a partner or group to work with.

Overview

In the prior assignment, you conducted needfinding for your application and identified some promising application ideas. Over the next two assignments, you’ll develop the design of your solution across two phases: a divergent phase (this assignment), in which you’ll brainstorm a wide range of ideas; and then a convergent phase (the next assignment), where you’ll begin to work out the details of your proposed design and user interface.

As part of your brainstorming process, you’ll collect and analyze “comparables”—features from apps that already exist, both as a source of inspiration and to help you differentiate your design. Through brainstorming, you’ll also explore the social and ethical values of your emerging application design by applying some value-sensitive design prompts. The purpose is not just to set boundaries or restrictions on your design, but also to suggest new design possibilities.

Tasks

The result of this assignment will be a brief design document that you’ll construct in a series of tasks.

  1. Broad application goals. Read over your report from your needfinding assignment, and decide what your focus will be: who your app will be for and what value it will bring beyond existing apps. Record in your design document a fun name for your app; a description in a few words of the intended audience; and a sentence or two about the value that it will bring to users beyond existing apps.

  2. Scrapbook of comparables. Look for apps that either seek to provide similar value to their users, or have a piece of functionality that might be applicable to your idea. Collect clippings of these app (e.g., GIFs/videos/screenshots of their user interfaces or from explanations on their websites). Caption each clipping with a couple sentences to (1) describe where it’s coming from, and what it’s showing; (2) explain how it might be useful to your design brainstorming. For example, you might take a screenshot of When2Meet’s calendar painting widget and caption it “Selecting available times in When2Meet: could we apply this idea to a map to have our users mark their home neighborhoods?”. Collect a sufficient number of clippings such that you have a breadth and depth of inspiration to draw from for your brainstorm in the next step.

  3. Brainstorming feature ideas. Brainstorm a collection of possible features for your application. You should aim to produce a list of 15–20 plausible features, focusing on novel, target-audience-specific features (rather than “standard” kinds of features such as user authentication, commenting, etc.). Give every feature a name and describe it succinctly in a couple of sentences. See the advice section below, and in particular, consider doing this collaboratively. If you choose to collaborate with others, please remember to note down their names in your design doc.

  4. VSD analysis. VSD provides four dimensions (or criteria) with associated prompts: stakeholders (identifying the people directly or indirectly impacted); time (thinking through short, medium, and long-term effects); pervasiveness (imagining what might happen if the design is broadly adopted); and values (evaluating in terms of common values such as autonomy, community, inclusion and fairness). For each of the four dimensions, read through all the prompts, and consider how they might apply to your application, its goals, and the features you brainstormed in the previous step. Think about the negative consequences you might find yourself needing to grapple with and mitigate. But, also think about how these prompts suggest opportunities for new kinds of designs or features.

    Record your insights as a list of points each comprising: (a) an observation that explicitly refers to the relevant criterion, prompt, and features; and (b) a design response, which might involve removing, limiting, adjusting, extending a feature, or even adding a new one. Aim to have at least five insights that are explained in 30-75 words each.

  5. Storyboarding and sketching. To help you figure out how to winnow down your feature brainstorm into a more cohesive application, identify 2–3 key user “flows” each of which comprises a series of actions a user must take to fulfill a goal that they have. For each flow, produce a storyboard: a sequence of annotated sketches that begins by depicting a user’s motivation for forming the goal, and then shows the actions they must perform with a UI (and how the UI responds) for accomplishing the goal.

    For example, flows for an online bookstore might include: looking for a book; ordering a book; returning a book; and so on. A storyboard for “looking for a book” might begin by showing a user hoping for some escapism. Then, across a series of steps, the storyboard would depict how they would move through the application to identify a potentially set of subjects or genres of interest, and then winnow down to specific books they find interesting. These steps would show how a user would manipulate the user interface (e.g., what buttons would they press), how the user interface would respond (e.g., filtering down the list of books), and how a user would make sense of what was shown.

    As you put together the storyboards, note down things that feel brittle or unclear about the flow—these will serve as fodder to prompt your work in the next (convergent) phase of the design process.

Submitting your work

Post your design document to your portfolio by the assignment deadline. Feel free to structure your document as you please; you can have multiple sections of a single page, or you could split the document into separate pages. Do not just put your document in a PDF!

Submit this Google form to finalize your assignment submission, also by the deadline.

You must do both steps for us to consider your assignment submitted.

Rubric

The teaching staff will grade your assignment using the following rubric. Grading will occur qualitatively, and the teaching staff will conduct multiple rounds of collaborative grading, calibration, and cross-checking to ensure consistency. This assignment is worth 10 points. Submissions that meet the expectations (i.e., the Satisfactory column) will roughly map to a B (8/10). Submissions that exceed expectations will roughly map to an A (9/10), while submissions that require substantial improvement will be awarded a C (7/10). Note that individual rubric cells may not map to specific point values, and excessively long answers will be penalized.

Part Excellent Satisfactory Needs Improvement
Audience and value App serves an important, underserved audience. Value is compelling, and grounded in important real-world user needs that are unaddressed in the current environment. A well-scoped target audience is identified, but is relatively well-served by existing applications. Value is plausible, but it is unclear either whether this value emerges from real user needs, or whether this value is sufficiently differentiated from existing options to warrant users switching. Target audience is too broad and/or already have a plethora of options to choose from. Value is not clearly articulated, and/or largely recapitulates the value of existing options.
Comparables Diverse range of comparables that are well-captioned to suggest non-obvious good ideas to borrow from. Creative connections are drawn to applications from different domains. Comparables suggest competent borrowing, but draw from a relatively straightforward and familiar set of sources. Mismatched or missing comparables suggest that design will not be grounded in knowledge of existing work.
Feature brainstorming At least 20 features cover a broad and diverse range of functionality. Brainstormed features largely offer either novel functionality, or a compelling riff on existing ideas by emphasizing an audience- or problem/domain-specific need or characteristic. At least 15 features cover a large range of functionality. Brainstormed features show promise in terms of novelty, but could be better differentiated from existing functionality by leaning into specific qualities of either the intended audience or problem/application domain. Fewer than 15 features have been brainstormed, or brainstormed features cover a relatively narrow range of functionality. Essential features may be missing. Several features are routine or generic.
VSD analysis A crisp and thoughtful analysis that uncovers at least five insights that go beyond well-known issues (e.g., covered in the press/podcasts/classes/etc.) and includes several well-considered and/or creative design modifications. A good analysis that identifies at least five real issues and offers corresponding, albeit relatively routine, design responses. However, deeper research would help surface richer insights and/or suggest more creative design modifications. A shallow analysis has been conducted, and has yielded either fewer than five insights, or insights that are relatively trivial or have missed larger, more important issues. Design modifications are relatively minor.
Storyboard Sketches Storyboards clearly communicate a user’s action sequence with the envisaged interface, and depict how the interface would respond. A user’s motivations and goals are well-grounded and convincing. Storyboards do a good job of relaying a user’s action sequence, but there is some lack of clarity about how they would accomplish a particular step with the interface (or how the interface might respond). User motivations and goals are present, but may occasionally be trite or contrived. Storyboards are hard to follow or fail to cover key functionality. User motivations and goals are missing or shallow.

Advice

  • Read the class guide. Make sure you have read and understood the rules for collaboration, submission and slack days, and the general class advice in the class guide.

  • Start early. If you make an early start on thinking about your design, you’ll have it in mind over the next few days, and you’ll come up with novel ideas and insights without trying too hard. But if you leave the whole assignment until the last day, it will be hard to think creatively, and you’ll have much less fun.

  • Collaborative brainstorming. Brainstorming is more fun, and more effective, if you do it collaboratively. You can find a partner or a group of students from the class to work with, or even get a friend or roommate to brainstorm a bit with you. Use the “yes, and” tactic from improv in which you try to build on and riff on other people’s ideas, and avoid negative, critical analysis. Focus on generating as many new ideas as you can. Take notes as you go. Read this short tutorial for some tactics you can apply to make your brainstorming more generative.

  • Sources of feature ideas. To feed into your brainstorming session, you might also find feature ideas by looking at feature lists of familiar apps in Wikipedia (such as this list for Instagram). Soren Iverson has a nice stream of design ideas on his Twitter/X feed. GPT is good at generating lists of feature ideas, but you may want to try your hand at it first, and then use GPT to see what you might have missed. This will help you develop your own brainstorming skills, and will make it less likely that you get stuck with some more routine ideas that it’s hard to go beyond. (Check the class guide for our GPT policy.)

  • VSD analysis. When applying the VSD prompts, always try and think not only about bad consequences of your design but good ones too. What value might your app bring beyond serving the needs of individual users? Consider whether the design responses that you identify (eg.removing, limiting, adjusting, extending a feature), can also create more overall value for everyone (think curb-cut effect).

  • Read around, and do your research. Conducting a good VSD analysis will require more than just thinking really hard about the criteria and prompt. Augment your thinking by doing some research around the prompt. For instance, are there news articles (e.g., on The Verge, TechCrunch, TechMeme, or the tech columns of the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal) that are relevant to one of the prompts?

  • Sketching. Sketching is not wireframing! Make your sketches simple and clear, and don’t spend too much time finessing them. Use pen (or pencil) and paper, or a tablet; don’t use a diagramming or wireframing tool that will make it harder to express ideas quickly and freely. You’ll have a chance to develop your wireframing skills in a later assignment.