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Team work evaluation about sharing activities

As a remote/distributed team we had some difficulties in facilitating teamwork, but managed to find time to work together despite of different time zones. The team work was spread almost evenly, but our composition changed just before prototyping in the beginning of phase two.

The total amount of activity points is a bit unclear, so for evaluation we will suggest to share the points as below: Pegah, Tamil and Meri will receive 24% of available points, Vinh 20% and Ville 8%.

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MVP Validation II: Results

An occasional but regular issue

The need to learn new skills or update existing ones was reported to be challenge that occurs at least once a year. On average, it was reported, that the problem comes about 1-3 times a year. New workers face this problem much more frequently. Generally, this problem was handled through self-study, but in some cases senior workers were able to teach the new skills. Actual learning platforms had reportedly been in little use. Instead, the interviewee, who was a professional in tech, had in these cases made use of the proper documentation of whichever new technology he was faced with. For this purpose, the quality, clarity and unambiguity of the documentation was crucial.

Voice-controlled learning platform might not be the best solution

Concern was voiced over the use of home assistant devices such as Alexa, which was shown on the slides. Having a device, which is always listening, was immediately called out as hotline to the NSA and other nefarious entities. Concerns about voice-based learning platfoms were raised over other aspects as well. After all, not everyone is an auditive learner. People who make use of voice commands and devices like Alexa are reportedly very rare.

It was suggested that a learning platform ought to be implemented as a mobile app or a SaaS. Tech workers, programmers in particular, have a ready access to computer and remote connections. This is certainly accentuated during the Corona outbreak.

The right study path can broadly be user determined

Choosing what to learn might not be the most sensible way to start studying. It was reported that the need to learn something new frequently rises from needing to get a certain something done. One’s learning path isn’t necessarily a very complicated affair. If a user is made to go through things he already knows, he’s going to get frustrated and lose motivation. It was suggested that the user can himself sort out which are things he already knows.

Socializing and collaborating is a specific customer segment

The interviewee did not feel that the social, networking feature of the platform would be of much use to him. It was conceded though, that such people probably do exist, who would benefit from it. Networking can be a very good vector for building up a user base. A fellow user might not be willing to help out with a problem. Some kind of point-based bulletin board system in the style of Stack Overflow might be good. People can answer questions when they feel like it, and the information will be out there for all users to see. The interviewee suspected that the platform would likely be adopted by what he termed “young, skilled professionals”, or in other words, recently graduated information workers. Senior workers, he surmised, are likely to be so set in their ways as to not be very eager to adopt new learning or working techniques.

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Future Learning System PoC: Idea and Validation

Description about the idea

Future Learning System is a learning platform that helps you to create your own meaningful path based on your goals.

Gives access to quality materials and enriching networks, with people that share your passion. Future Learning System is available right where you are and helps you to create a sustainable plan that integrates to your busy life.

In Future Learning system your personal virtual assistant creates learning paths and course plans, that are converted to schedules. It recommends and books mentoring appointments, and reserves enough time for you to finish up early. If the system has access to your personal health apps and monitoring wearables, we can ensure a balanced way of achieving your dreams, by gathering feedback about the overall health and wellbeing, matched with working hours and activities.

With us you learn about yourself, and how to reach your goals faster. You’re able to modify the pace and learning style recommendations based on your user profile. You get to showcase your practical skills, and get valuable feedback from collaboration and peers

Our courses provide certificates, handbooks, learning diaries and access to networks from all around the world

Validation of our idea

We tested the idea with a storyboard and interview. The storyboards presented a user facing practical challenge to get access of a personalized learning path, quality materials and networking. The first validation proved that there already are platforms for quality materials that can be categorized by a topic or a path. 

How then would our product be different and what more could we offer? 

One critical aspect was to be able to modify the learning pace to match personal preferences. Our product gives the possibility to have a feedback loop with the system and recommendations to match users learning style and current experience level, and start were you are.

Also, it seems that with the more senior professionals there is only a little interest on basic courses, so we’d need to provide access to the very recent practical experiences from the top of the profession. 

In addition, the collaboration and networking should be available but not mandatory. Individual schedules might be difficult to match perfectly, so a hologram with a speech interfaces, and AI generated conversational experiences might be beneficial. One idea was to recreate projects or experiences from world class experts, so that you could follow a character on set as the problems are solved during the process.

Features

Phase: finding a course o Personalized paths and recommendations are based on user background and goal interview o Find contact information or reviews on the course from course alumni (people who have already taken the course) Phase: On a course o Select a pace and plan the course in a calendar; calendar integration for planning the learning tasks and studying o Gather daily feedback about physiological/mental/emotional levels like oura o Service reminds about the frequency of tasks and path to encourage the student to stay on track o Recreated learning experiences from leading professional teams working on real projects o Showcasing their practical skills o Getting feedback from collaboration and project outcomes from peers o Give visibility about others students to collaborate and give suggestion about mentoring or human contacting Phase: Finishing a course o Certificates for different domain specific roles o Find people with a certain skill-level from those who pass courses to work in a project o Give evaluation about course and feedback o Enroll as mentors, to receive discounts on future courses 

Meri / Team MPTVV

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UX Goals for Future Learning Center

UX Goal #1

“Creating the product that is enjoyable”

Measuring:

To know if our product is enjoyable or not, a scale is needed. In the process of gathering feedback, a traditional way is required however, our product offers a new way of getting feedback is a voice scale. For example like Bay Max in the fiction cartoon Big Hero 6. This voice will ask something like “on scale of one to ten how do you evaluate your satisfaction”. 

UX Goal #2 

“Supports people to be deeply engaged to their meaningful personal path or life goals”

Measuring:

Evaluate the goals and hidden preferences and skills with user survey. Measure progress and commitment on subtasks. Gather users subjective feedback on recommendations and goals. Evaluate time used on planning, reflecting, and completing the course. Create drop-out scenario analysis, and analyze user behavior in phases prior to ending the course.

UX Goal #3

“Learning and challenging yourself is more fun with realistic goals and steady commitments to small steps”

Measuring:

Get users subjective feedback about experience, perception, and feelings: liking, annoyance, engagement, fun, want to use again. Measuring user tasks on platform eg. completing subtasks on time, completed courses, recommendations, retention over time, rate of errors, task success, time on task, use of navigation. Measuring the quality of the outcomes: course grades, learning path evaluation, time on course vs. commitment on path. Measure use of collaboration and networking, and it’s relation to individual outcomes.

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From MVP to PoC

Notes on the process

At this point I personally had difficulties to follow our course outline and the relationship between MVP and PoC, and what sort of outcomes the project should cover in total. After reading the course material and reading information about the differences I still find the order a bit shady. Referring to a hackernoon.com post*), I would argue that the course could use only the a prototype as an outcome, since we have no method to actually assess the feasibility of our choices of future technologies in ten years. I also looked out at MIT Tangible Media Group site**) for some inspiration on how vision based desin could be approached. Should the vision based design be also covered in this course in addition to user need finding?

*) https://hackernoon.com/mvp-vs-prototype-vs-poc-a-complex-choice-of-strategy-made-simple-f0875811b995

**) https://tangible.media.mit.edu/vision/

We, the team, continued to have our whatsapp chat about the project and tasks and online meeting discussions. Just when we were beginning to work with the next steps, we also welcomed a new member, Ville!

PoC and UX goals

After the feedback sessions, we created a feature map and a customer journey map to understand the feedback and select a couple of ux goals for our PoC. There was a lot of features available for us to work on. (Pic 1, Pic 2)

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MVP Validation I: Results

Product/Service in general

Product is seen realistic and interesting. Similar products are in the market already. At the moment, triggers for attending courses come from peer recommendations, technology blogs, and business partners in consulting companies.

Time management is a challenge. There is very little time for learning during workdays, prescheduling is necessary to include several hours or days to schedule. Selecting right courses is therefore critical. Recommendations: peers, senior professionals or managers. Student’s level of expertise in learning topic should be taken into consideration in content.

Critical features

Content should be up to date, also with the most recent technologies. If the latest technology related courses are not available, the service is useful only for junior level learners. For senior-level professionals the stabilized technologies are not relevant.

Personalized learning paths are very important.

Collaboration in learning      

Collaboration is seen beneficiary if it supports real-life contacts and networking, but it should not be mandatory. Individual schedules and learning paths ensure flexibility. Platform leaderboards or user ranking for measuring performance. Service needs to adapt to personal preference learning and interaction.

Rather connecting to people, the tool may conduct challenges very week or every month (coding challenge/whatever the course the user is taking) so people on that day can go and participate in those kind of challenges as virtual workshops (VR).

Also, it could be useful to have contact persons for courses for in-person discussions in case there is any need of assistance. Face to face sessions might be interesting or additional real-life courses.

Validation of the features: suggestion for added features

Interviewees suggested that the service could offer a conversational application for asking questions when they come up during lessons and all the discussions or questions should be exported to a learning diary for later reflection or debriefing. Also, there was an interest to have a personal learning diary with visuals and reflection created about the course for instance to establish a handbook about the content.

Service should consider offering a network of newest trends that are available from partnering in frontline projects and giving access the insights directly from there.

Interface and technology choices

The service should be available in any device, anywhere. Platform should adapt to personal preferences. All the interaction and impulses from the product should be modified to user preference to avoid excess of distractions during day.

Calendar integration would enable creating a plan or a reoccurring event to a calendar to have a session with the product instead of preplanned one-day courses.

Virtual and augmented reality; conversational artificial intelligence, real-time hologram technology, AI recommendation and learning path, voice interface, virtual assistant

Meri / Team MPTVV

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Validating the MVP

We will validate our MVP with the storyboard and an interview:

Here is a story that illustrates problems related to learning skills in working life. It also presents some potential solutions. I would go through each slide and I will ask your opinion,

Let’s start:

Slide 1,2,3: it is 2035 Ed is facing quite lots of the problems to keep himself up to date with related technologies and skills. He wants to be multidiscipline and learn various skills related to different job positions.

What do you think about this scenario?

What do you think about problems Ed faces?

What kind of problems you have faced related to this?

Do you think what is the future learning platform in 2020?

Slide 4,5: Using virtual assistant (Alexa), Hologram, cell phone, AI connects and based on end user background and his goal creates a learning path. (Different courses, webinar, practices).

What do you think about it?

What do you like to do differently? Why

What you would add?

Would you use this product? How? When? In what context?

Slide 6:

Could you explain back that what do you think is this slide about?

How you would feel like to collaborate with another ppl like you and help each other in this learning path?

How beneficial it is to learn with others?

Would you use this feature?

What you would add to it or you would do it differently?

Slide 7:

How do you see this learning service? (Please describe it)

How you would use it and interact with it? (Think about the future in 2035 and anything is possible)

The results are not yet available, but we will reflect on those as a team and share the results in the next blogpost.

Meri / Team MPTVV

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Working towards MVP

Our team is designing a learning platform and a collaboration service. The product has reliable, and practical content, and it creates personalised learning paths adapting to the users personal and professional goals, and current resources available to the user. This engaging service gives feedback and recommendations that reflect the users learning style and interpersonal skills to ensure a smooth upskilling experience with the ability to network over professional development. Below we present a storyboard with five pictures.

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Value Proposition Canvas

From our brainstroming sessions we created a value proposition canvas (pic 1) as a base for our minimum viable product (MVP).

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Blogpost 4.1 Personas

During our online meeting the team discussed about who the users, how to conduct the user interviews to gather user information to create persona for the project to get clear vision of our users.

Firstly, we were open with focusing on our user group which were namely with health sector, software, technology and education. We decided to conduct a semi structured interview to gather the information about the users. Team members came up with interview questions. Team managed to gather user information from user interview with two users who are from technology sector ageing from 25-35.  

The user information’s are then converted to personas using Extensio which was referred by our team member Pegah as she was familiar with the website and freely available for students.

User 1:

User 1 work as a Junior Developer and single whose goals are to keep him updated related to his field and career goals. He learns by doing and from seniors as well as attending the conferences. The problem faced by the user was that the learning platforms which he uses does not provide enough content and was not sure which content would be beneficial for his career as some of the platforms are very slow and not practical and he felt most are so academical.

User 2:

User 2 work as Senior Engineer and married whose goals are staying updated with the current and future technology trends. This user reads technology news related to his domain and future career goals and does not use any learning platform as the user has been in the field for more than 10 years and is familiar with information gathering from various web sources. The problems faced during the workplace is that improper communication between the team and the higher officials in delivering their ideas to the stake holders.

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Ideation process (Blogpost 4.2)

Our ideation process started evolving from a bit unfinished need finding and persona creation phase. Only one of us had the chance to participate in the lecture and after the workshop Vinh reflected the experience in the lecture and a picture of his mind map from the workshop.

Team ideation #1: Zoom-meeting and a Slack conversation

In the team online meeting we discussed Vinh experiences and decided to try out a How Might We? round since the lecture material wasn’t available yet. This resulted in about ten ideas. As we we’re still working on personas, we had not agreed about our focus customer group, but in general the question was:

in ten years from now, how might we work remotely with a number of causes/workteams and experience continuity in worklife/individual professional development?

We listed around ten ideas about customer activities and product features. After some individual work between sessions, we joined again as team to continue with another set of ideation. 

Team ideation #2: Zoom-meeting and a Miro-board

It was not a deliberate decision to continue with the same method, but choosing to continue with HMW allowed some space to discuss the past interviews, future scenarios and the product features during the meeting. This time the lecture material was available for the team and we had a chance to review the example ideation session structure presented in the material.

At first we discussed about the point-of-view and the insight we got from the interviews. We are aiming for people in working life, approximately aged 25-35 in 2030 (currently they are aged 15-25). This customer group is already in a path that is based on lifelong learning, and will probably face a very different work life than previous generations. 

Generation X and Millennials will have more reskilling need in order to navigate the technological changes the next decades before retirement. Also, retirement might be a very different concept when population aging starts to have an impact on labour availability. It’s important that every citizen has the basic understanding about technology and digital skills to foster inclusion.

So, for the second how might we -round we agreed that our focus group customers:  - are likely to be or aspire to be multiskilled cross-fields professionals - that work in collaboration with others. - The product answers for their needs in self-development, career development, staying on track of technology, and have job security. - They are likely to practice remote work in multi-team environments.  

We got ten additional features to our product and the method with the discussion clarified few ideas that were poorly communicated. In the next phase we reversed the ideas, and thought about negative sides and translated them to positive features. After working together we got about 30 features to the product that we continued to categorize in Miro-board. 

https://miro.com/app/dashboard 

(Let’s add a picture of our board here once available)

Online meetings are essential when working in a remote team. No amount of individual work can’t cover the free discussion at an early stage. Misunderstandings happen easily in a remote work and can be overcome in real-time when the team is available for discussion.

Once we set up the miro-board all ideas can be categorized and voted on.

Meri / Team MPTVV

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Blog post #3

1/       - Stakeholders: In our project 4 people are the main stakeholder are the one who work directly on the project: Meri, Tamil, Vinh, Pega.

- As we work with AR, VR and AI with Vincit so the technical support person from Vincit is also the stakeholder.

- Our project is also supported by Jari ( our teacher ) so he is also a Stakeholders

 2a/ Group name: Teenagers (from 15 to 25 years old):

-Description: These people are in the period of planning their life and goal for success. However, many do not have a clear view about their career. Some choose their major base on the popularity or one because their parents like that major. They do not know what they can do, what their skills so they may follow a path that may not belong to them.

-Problem solving: working with AI work life coach, they will show what is there hobbies, what they like to do, what are their past achievement or things they have done make them proud. After collecting enough information about the user, some path with detail process will be drawn for the user to choose and follow. They can also decide the level of achievement they want to success.

 2b/ Group name: Elderly (from 45 and upper):

-Description: These people are now at the last quarter of their life, the majority of them do not want to take in charge of high and intense work in the society, they want to find peace. However, at this age, disease are the main problems and the other is that their knowledge is somehow too old comparing to the current one. This will make a lot of difficulties in solving and choosing what to do when they have disease symptom.

Problem solving: the AI work life coach will have enough data to analyze user symptom and record disease history/diary so that AI can give out the most suitable cure and treatment.

 3/ Interview question:

           1/ Where do you study ?

                       Purpose: to know the interviewee background and the core for following question            2/ What is your hobbies?

                       Purpose: to know his or her hobbies – this also the clue for the following question

           3/ Do you have any strength?

                       Purpose: try to find out if the user know his/herself clearly and this is the clue for the next question.

           4/ What is your major?

                       Purpose: more details in his/her learning parts

           5/ Can you tell me why do you choose this major?

                       Purpose: to ask the reason for the choosing major decision. At this stage there are 2 condition. 1 if he or she answer such as he or she choose the major base on his or her strength => continue with the question 6. 2 if he or she just choose because of being told or something continue with question 7.

           6/ In some opinion, human always has some hidden skill that they have not observed yet, can you tell me what do you think if some one told you that you have some skill but you do not know?

                       Purpose: to ensure about the potential of a user and ask lead them to our project of self-reflection and hidden skill observation

           7/ Our project is to provide you an AI work life coach to help you to investigate yourselves, can you tell me the opinion or aspect of yourselves toward AI criteria?

                       Purpose: to know if they actually know what AI is because some people do not have a good impression on AI

           8/ What do you think about self-reflection?

                       Purpose: in our project self-reflection is a method for improvement as you can watch yourselves through your process.

           9/ If you find out that the path drawn by the AI work life coach is not suitable for you (in some situation) you will keep believing the process or you will drop out for another process?

                       Purpose: to know if the user will believe our system much or not

           10/ Do you have any question ?

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Blogpost # 2.1 Human - centered design Standard

This blogpost explains how our team will use ISO 9241-210:2019 Ergonomics of human-system interaction in our project. This standard provides overall framework of the human centered design meaning that the users needs, requirements are considered during each phase of product development to produce useful product that meets users’ requirements.

In our project we will be following the principles, planning and Human-Centered design activities based on the time and available resources.

As mentioned in the standard we will be starting with User research, gathering data from stakeholder meeting in addition to self-research by team. As the team already gathered data related to technology trends it will be refined and narrowed down to match user requirements and choose the appropriate technology based on user and stakeholder needs.

With all the gathered data the team will define the user needs and requirements and start setting the goal. After Understanding the user needs and specifying the context of use the team will provide sufficient detail to design. The team will come up with various ideas for the initial design which will be narrowed to meet user requirements. The initial prototype will be designed. This initial prototype will be tested with the user using one of the User-centered evaluation methods and the method of testing will be decided by team in the later phase after initial ideas. If supportive data was found from the evaluation the initial prototype will be redesigned. Due to limited time it will not be feasible for team to test the product iteratively as mentioned in the standard but iterative testing might be useful to design a product for long term use. The final design prototype meeting the user requirements will be shared to the stakeholder and discussed. The stakeholder and user will be considered and contacted during the process based on the project requirement.

The team already has a project plan which will be updated all through the project based on the team and project needs.

The conformance mentioned in the standard document to check whether the product have met all the requirements will be considered. This can be achieved by considering the checklist provided in the document. The checklist for assessing applicability and conformity provided in the standard will be used for the project. Principles, planning, activities of human-centered design, specification of user requirements from the checklist will be considered to check to conform whether we meet the user requirements. This checklist won’t be utilized as a whole, as it has extensive recommendations, the team will consider some of the recommendations based on project needs and use those if required.

Overall project flow and team progress at various stages of product design adapted from the Human-centered design for interactive systems standard is shown below. This will be modified and updated in later phase based on the team’s goal and progress.

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Future workplace learning trend map

Technology is growing and the way we work and live is transforming. Workplace in ten years from now will be very different from today because of fast-evolving technologies. Not only will employees have to learn throughout their careers, but they will also need to learn new technological skills and also soft skills. The below trend map is focusing on future workplace learning

1.     Personalization tools and content: It aims to provide efficient, effective and customized learning paths based on employees’ goals, needs, expectations, and backgrounds. AI and machine learning algorithms are a big part of personalization.

2.     Faster adaptation of new technologies: As new technologies are emerging faster; than ever before, employees needs to be able to adapt and obtain new skills quickly. The learning platform, webinar, virtual classrooms, and analytics could help employees to cope with this new need to learn new skills faster.

3.     Learning experience: New platforms promising a rich learner-driven experience where a learner can contribute rather than just receive learning. Content comes from different resources and learning can become integrated with productivity. The learning experience can be enhanced with the use of augmented or virtual reality and virtual assistants

4.     Social and collaborating learning: Organizations and employees will realize the benefits of sharing and contributing to knowledge exchange. New social /collaborative productivity tools will support communication and collaborating in the workplace and they will integrate with mainstream productivity tools. Future learning platforms, webinar, speech reorganization, voice user interface and learning support via voice could help to enhance social and collaborative learning.

5.     Innovation is everywhere: To succeed in a rapidly changing world, all employees have to be innovative. Organizations should give workers opportunities to come forward and turn ideas into something. Analytics and virtual assistants can be used to help in this context

The most potential trends are personalization tools and content, the faster adaptation of new technologies. These two have the most impact on future workplace learning. With the constant need to develop new skills in work life, the personalization of the learning content gives us the tools that we need to cope with this change. Technologies are useful are AI, machine learning, learning platform, webinar, virtual classrooms, and analytics.

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Week 1: Teamwork

I think we were already synchronised with Tamil last week when showing up to the workshop. As this was my first time at Hervanta campus, I took a thorough, but not a deliberate expedition in different parts of the campus and the buildings before getting to the class. We met outside the class, arriving at the same time. After a brief discussion we decided to form a team of four with Vinh and Pegah who were working remotely on that day. 

During the team building exercises we got some idea of our shared interests in the field of technology and design, but also a few laughs when trying to express and mimic abstract terms like ‘problem’ and ‘creativity’.

I guess those words will be come into use during the next months. Our goal is to create a work life coach to help teams and individuals to succeed. The design challenge will be based on a user research and we’ll present the solution with a prototype and a 10 minute video. As a learning outcome the group acquires understanding about human-centered development process and teamwork.

About that work... 

In our online kick-off meeting we finally got a chance to discuss live. Tamil set up a Zoom-meeting for the team. The scheduling was a bit of a puzzle, since Vinh was in Vietnam, Pegah in Canada, and Meri and Tamil in Finland. During the meeting we reviewed the project plan draft and schedule, discussed about the case, and the skills each of us can offer and the new things everyone willing to try out. It was agreed that the general project management and process documentation will be done in turns so that everyone can participate. 

We will meet in person weekly in workshops and weekly tasks are drafted for an online discussion to agree with the whole team. We’ll determine whether deadlines are hard or soft ones and how much work it’ll require from us as a team. Team contribution and reporting is discussed on these weekly meetings too.

The progression is followed on Tuesday, and since one of us works remotely, we’ll have an online meeting on Tuesday afternoons. A Slack workspace and a messaging group is set up for a daily discussion.

Feedback on the workshop

Worksop pre-task was insightful. Combined with the lecture and team exercises the workshop was a good start for teamwork. It’s easy get carried away with the product as goal, and loose contact with the team members on a more personal level. It was nice to get to know a little bit about Tamil and her interests, and think we need to bring something from this experience to our online meetings. It’s very useful also to discuss the basic rules beforehand to establish the team and help everyone commit to the work. 

Meri / Team MPTV