This week we heard back from a lot of our former professors and teachers that were interested in the project and were able to help out with interviews. We were able to conduct several interviews in person with professors, and get feedback from former teachers through e-mail. We actually ended up getting an unexpected interview while we were interviewing one of my former professors. Another professor was in the room and he was also willing to talk with us for a while and share some of his experiences, so that was pretty cool! It was nice to see that someone who we didn't really know was interested enough in the content of our project to spend time answering our questions.
Everyone we've talked to about the project so far has seemed pretty interested in it and several have mentioned that they thought that it could potentially help out visually impaired students in their classes. While talking to the professors and teachers however, some new questions were raised for us.
For example, a lot of science and math professors use multiple colors in their notes...perhaps they are drawing a graph and showing different sin curves and need to indicate the different functions with different colors. This is something we hadn't really considered, and although it's more of a hardware concern, I think it's important that we thought of it now. When the team that's working on the hardware begins, we can let them know that a lot of diagrams won't be very useful to students unless they are in color and so they can look into if and how they can do that with the special casing for the dry erase markers.
I thought that this was a pretty good example of how easy it can be to overlook some requirements if you don't communicate enough with the stakeholders for your project. I'm sure we'll have the same kind of thing happening after we talk to some of the students and hear what they have to say on the subject. They will most likely make us aware of additional requirements we need to add, or maybe even that some of the requirements we've thought of so far aren't necessary.
Speaking of talking to the students, today Abhishek and I finished up a rough draft of the survey for visually impaired students. We worked on it a lot on Tuesday, but we ended up making quite a few revisions today, and, seeing as how we are new to creating surveys, we will probably still need to change and add things for the final survey.
It's sort of interesting how differently you need to approach interviews and surveys. With surveys you really can't be vague at all or else there's a really good chance that you're going to get answers to questions you didn't think you were asking. With interviews if the person doesn't understand a question or misinterprets it you can reword it for them or say "What we're really interested in is _____ " but with surveys by the time you find out that the student thinks you're asking about high school when you're actually asking about college, it's too late because they've already completed the survey. Face to face interaction definitely seems to be, in some ways, the easiest method to effectively communicate with your potential users.
You have organized a global work! Well done! It does not surprise me that people are interested in your project. He's really interesting. I hope you have gained valuable experience. By the way if you want to create mobile version of your product you should know how to promote app and be successful.
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