Co-design. (17-10-2016)

Participatory design (originally co-operative design, now often co-design). 

Is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders (for example employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Is focused on processes and procedures instead of a visual design. 

Recent research suggests that designers create more innovative concepts and ideas when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own.

During a co-design session we talk about the different processes of our agenda, the users and their assignments, what they will see, what they can do, the proper device for the use of the agenda, etc.

Board Games

Despite what one might initially think, board games are not simply a fun game, but also serve as a useful tool in order to obtain more information about users.

Main Idea: 

A board game in the context of software engineering is based on a regular traditional board game, but usually with slight modifications so it works better in context. For example one could use a pre-existing board game like "Snakes and Ladders" or "Monopoly" as basis for the gameplay of the project, and then subsequently change the aesthetic and visual design in order to apply it to your product. For examplle, instead of  using Monopoly's design which is based on a housing district, one could keep the basic ideas of squares around a layers advance, and yet place it inside a school or another environment more appropiate for the investigation. 
The key aspect of using board games is to acquire accurate information regarding your users, it is usually better to directly observe how others act than to simply ask them about their actions, because by asking there is always the risk of the person lying or not being sufficiently self aware to objectively analyze their own behaviour.

Benefits: 

a)  The principles of gamification are being applied.
b) It forces participants to speak, otherwise conversations might be dominated by 1 or 2 people with everybody else being silent.
c) Allows cooperation.
d) Useful for creative proccesses.

  

Use Case Diagrams

Use case diagrams are a form of visual representation of a specific system, it is similar to UML diagrams, except that use case diagrams are more general and can be applied to any kind of system, process or anything like those. Use case diagrams are used to ilustrate the various processes, steps, and relationships between different elements of a system. An example of one is the following:

 

 Elements of a Use Case Diagram:

a) Actors: An element (usually a person), that must interact with the system and exerts change.
b) Requirements: Enclosed in Ovals, these represent the specific actions that must be done. It is important to note that these actions follow a specific syntax, that of verb + noun, for example, in the above diagram, one action that can be performed is buy painting.
c) Use Case Relations: These are the lines that connect the various idead together.

Other Use Case Diagram Relationships:

a) Inheritance: You use this whenever you want to ilustrate a scenario in which a specific class acts slightly different than the general idea. For example, creating a publisher blog is a specific form of creating a blog.
b) Extends: Whenever you want to create a similar scenario to the main general idea, but that has the capacity to change if the situation warrants it. For example, normally a program would execute commands A,B, C, however if something goes wrong it might function as A, B,D. 
c) Include: Where a use case at some point reuses all of the steps of another use case.