Future+Workshop

Phase 2: Future Workshop
The results from phase one indicated that the users of the ICCIT website had many varying opinions and were willing and excited to share their ideas. However, since the results from the interviews focussed on the negative aspects of the current website and were presented in a fairly unstructured way, a new approach to elicit these ideas had to be taken. It was decided to facilitate a future workshop at this point to serve as a further brainstorming tool for new and innovative ideas to incorporate during the design process.

Objectives
During the interview session held in phase one of the design process, participants voiced many concerns about the current website. However, visions of the new design were not clearly defined. We wanted this future workshop to be an opportunity for participants to focus on a potential new design and envision new ideas that could be incorporated.

The ICCIT department is a cutting edge program that teaches students to be innovative in the face of technology. However, the current ICCIT website did not reflect their program's image. The hope of the future workshop was to allow participants to think outside of a practical structured design, and envision ideas that would spark future change and would remain innovative years into the future. We hoped to tap into the creativity of the people within ICCIT and uncover innovative ideas to use within the design.

One of the major challenges that we had previously identified within this project was the wide array of user groups. For example, the ideas and goals of the student website users differed greatly from those of a faculty member's. A brainstorming activity, such as a future workshop, gave many users the chance to participate within the design process early on. It was an opportunity to involve a large number of participants and for them to share the visions for the new design. Having this interaction occur early on exposed any differences of opinion while the design direction still remained undecided, and mitigated the risk for future conflict to interrupt the design process.

Design Session
Date: Friday February 4, 2011 Participants: • 4 fourth year students (2 on CCIT marketing team) • 2 faculty • 1 alumni • 1 third year student • 1 administrator Total: 9 participants Materials: • Post-It Notes • Sticky-tac • Paper • Markers • Blank wall The future workshop was conducted with nine participants representing as many different user groups as possible. We started by introducing ourselves and the design project for the ICCIT website. We also described the future workshop activity and how it related to the overall project. We decided to omit the critique section that usually initiates a future workshop session. In the interviews that were conducted in phase one of this project, the participants had a strong focus on the problems of the current website, and this focus limited their ability to discuss ideas for the new design. In addition to their focus during the interviews, the marketing team had previously prepared a document outlining the many problems they saw with the existing website. Due to the abundance of previously gathered information on the critique of the website, we thought our time would be better spent, and that the ideas being generated within the future workshop would better meet our outlined goals if the critique section was excluded.

Our future workshop consisted of three main steps. We described each step throughout the performance of the future workshop, but we also provided a handout to the participants to describe the activity and the procedure we were following (Handout can be found in Appendix A). The first was an individual exercise where participants were asked to write down personal ideas of what they would like to see included in a new website design that would be helpful both today and into the future (ie. 2015). Step two was to group individual participants into teams of two or three to discuss their ideas and write their favourites on the post-it notes we provided. While assembling the groups we attempted to keep them diverse in terms of the types of users represented. Therefore, we matched students with faculty instead of having a team of just students. Once the combined ideas were prepared we started collecting the post-it notes and sticking them on a blank wall within the room. While adding the post-its to the wall we asked participants to look for similarities amongst the various ideas represented on the post-its, and to group the similar ideas accordingly on the wall. Once the groupings of ideas were finalized, we asked participants to provide a creative name to each group which represented its contents. This process served as the basis for the brainstorming activity conducted within this future workshop.

Results
The result of the future workshop was an overall success, and many valuable and insightful ideas were collected. There was high participation from all individuals within the session, and each had an opportunity to voice their unique ideas. Our final output was the agreed upon organization of the ideas within the groups they had created. The full results and group titles can be seen in Appendix B of this document. These results contained many practical ideas, or aspects that exist in the current website but could be improved. However, the list of ideas also contained many innovative concepts that showcased the creativeness of the participants within the ICCIT department.

The one aspect of the future workshop that was not helpful to the progress of this project was the titles assigned to the groupings of ideas. The naming convention created focused on a "My ...", indicating features and content related to a student user's interactions with the website. However since this website had many varying user groups, the titles did not fit with respect to user groups outside of a student. Therefore the results of the future workshop included a list of features and content to consider in the new design, but the organization of that content still needed to be determined.

Another result of the future workshop was an observation regarding the potentially large scope for this project. We realized that this would be a good opportunity to limit our focus, and set goals that were obtainable within a timeframe that this course project allowed. We decided that since a major challenge for this project is to satisfy the variation in user groups, we did not want to ignore this element. Instead we decided to limit our scope in terms of functionality. The homepage of a website is one of the most critical elements so we wanted to address this design. In addition to the homepage, we also wanted to address some innovative piece of functionality to meet the need that continuously arose regarding the showcase of student and faculty work.

Assessment
The future workshop proved to be an excellent tool to use as a brainstorming activity in the early stages of the design process. Its interactive nature prompted much participation from all users involved in the workshop, which was one of our overall goals of this activity. It also achieved our objective of encouraging the participant to discuss new ideas for future change instead of critiquing the current design. However, some ideas were directly related to improvements on the old website. Some of the problems we encountered while performing the future workshop were those of organization. At times it was difficult for us to maintain the structure we had planned for the activity. Many times while we attempted to discuss an idea as a group, sub-groups would form that would discuss other ideas independently of the overall group. This confusion resulted in some disagreements over ideas and organization, as well as duplicated ideas arising upon review of the results. With the present confusion, it was difficult for us to limit our involvement in the activity and maintain a participatory nature. Occasionally, we would find ourselves making pointed suggestions to steer the direction or focus back on the intended topic. However, we maintained our role as facilitators as best as possible while ensuring the structure and productiveness of the workshop.

Another observation we encountered was that some users were finding it difficult to maintain the abstract nature of a brainstorming activity, and instead started to steer the conversation to the future design. The purpose of this workshop was to discuss ideas amongst other users of the site and not to consider how the ideas would come together in the end. However, it was clear that many of our users had many creative and interesting ideas on this topic and we wanted to ensure that we gave the participants an opportunity to express those ideas in a later design session.