Milestone 1

Problem

Our team is working with TechSmith to design a software product that will "drive" meetings and/or help meeting go-ers take information out of meetings.

Stakeholders

Our primary stakeholder for this project is TechSmith. TechSmith is interested in a meeting software product that will fit into their existing family of screen capture and audio recording software. Additionally, they want to explore the meeting software market and determine if their existing technologies can be leveraged for use in the context of meetings. People who attend and facilitate meetings are also important stakeholders for this project. The target group for this product will be meetings of 5-12 people in corporate and otherwise professional settings. This group is very complex and encounter a number of difficulties related to meetings. For example, meetings are often challenging to organize, meeting agendas might be overly ambitious or lacking, and meeting goers have different learning and attention styles which makes it difficult to ensure that everyone in a meeting is getting the same information. Our group will learn more about these challenges and then focus our efforts on easing major problems with facilitating meetings or helping people get information from meetings efficiently.

General Direction for Solution

Our team plans to think about this problem from three main perspectives: Human-Computer Interaction (which includes the Contextual Inquiry Method, Personas and Scenarios, and Prototyping), Organizational Psychology and Groupware Research. In addition to these theoretical groundings, our team plans to research competitors in the meeting software market and look at what technologies TechSmith already has that they can leverage in a new product. For example, TechSmith has the ability to record and screen and audio from meeting presentations which might be useful for archiving meetings.

Communication

Our primary method of communication on this project will be email and in-person meetings with our contact at TechSmith. Our group will use this website to communicate our project towards a design for this software product and our thinking around the design. We will post our background research, photos of team meetings, thoughts, and final versions of our milestones to the website. We plan to meet with our client and potential stakeholders in order to understand how these groups communicate and then tailor our communication styles as necessary to ensure that information is conveyed properly.

Our communication covenant: Link

Milestones

• Milestone 1 - Project Focus
• Milestone 2 - Contextual Inquiry
• Milestone 2.5 - Meeting Patterns Survey
• Milestone 3 - Personas & Scenarios
• Milestone 3.5 - Existing Software Research
• Milestone 4 - Lo-Fi Prototype
• Milestone 5 - Hi-Fi Prototype
• Milestone 6 - Final Presentation