Overview and aim：
The aim of the workshop was to quickly gather ideas about the way people interact with dogs, including what behaviours people are interested in, whether the reflective diary approach is effective, and the core functions of the fluffy diary website. These objectives were not presented all at once; for example, the questions about fluffy diary were established incrementally based on the workshop.
We anticipated that about two thirds of the participants in the workshop would have experience with dogs, and that the participants would include less than a third of people with no UX design background. We planned to divide the participants into two or three groups so that there would be a diversity of backgrounds within each group.
The communities think together on the basis of the questions we ask, record each member's ideas and discuss the pros and cons of the ideas together at the end. This allows for an efficient and convincing design. (Martin, Hanington, Universal Design Methodology).
Structure:
With regard to structure, the workshop was divided into three main phases: individual activities, compound activities and group activities.
The purpose of the individual activity was to help participants think about the motivations for exploring human-dog communication. In this phase we encourage participants to provide a variety of dog behaviours that have attracted their attention. These behaviours do not necessarily come from the participants' own dogs.
During the individual activity, each participant writes down a particular behaviour of the dog that interests them and then everyone's papers are put together and participants can vote on and discuss the three behaviours that they find most interesting and need to imagine how this behaviour of the dog can be understood.
At the beginning of the composite activity, we will introduce the participants to the use of a reflection diary and prepare a template for each of them to use for their reflection diary. The participants then complete a reflection diary on the dog's behaviour, following the observation-record-imitation-reflection-reflection process of the observation diary. After the participants have completed the diary, we put it together and all the participants look at it together and make their own suggestions after working with the diary.
In small groups, each group was asked to conceptualize how the concept of the reflective diary could be applied to a specific web or app design, and what parts of this application appealed to them and repelled them the most. This part was the final stage of the workshop and when we decided to present the concept of the reflective diary online after the composite activity, our whole project was officially in its final stage and the concept of the fluffy diary was close to being completed.
Testing and analysis of results:
I tested six participants of the workshop. The age distribution was between 20 and 30 years old, 4 females and 2 males, of which one male and one female did not own a pet, and they were divided into two groups.
- Team 1: graphic designer, user experience designer, programmer.
- Team 2: comic book author, postgraduate student in media, current student in UX design.
Overall, the workshop was a success. According to the participants' feedback, the reflective diary led them into deeper thinking to deepen their experience, and they were positive about the ease of use of the final version of the diary template after participating in the revision of the reflective diary.
The three main questions we asked were answered in a way that was accepted by all. Overall, the different professional backgrounds brought about a clash of perspectives throughout the session.
In terms of improvements to the reflective diary, participants with a design professional background would spontaneously adopt the AEIOU rule during the observation recording phase, while those without a design professional background would need more simple and easy to understand guidance, so the results we gained positioned the reflective diary itself in an eclectic way in terms of what it requires of participants in terms of their observation and recording skills. At the same time it was suggested that the steps in the template should be streamlined, for example by combining the reflections and reflections sections, and that the language style needed to be made more colloquial and shorter.
In terms of the application of the reflective diary concept, it was suggested that the webpage could have the properties of a community platform, which could be converted into a time-limited event, thus combining online and offline opportunities for communication between people and dogs in the dog-owning community. The other idea is to create a website with an electronic diary, named fluffy diary, and there are two different views on the functionality of this website. One wants to make the diary more accessible to other users, and to increase the interest of new users in observing the diary through interaction between users. while maintaining a certain level of privacy. After a collective discussion we decided that a website with a simple and tightly focused e-diary would be more in line with our aim and would be the most unique. So far our workshop has been a resounding success.
On the development of workshop's ideas for web functionality：
Original idea：
New ideas for web functionality and layout after the workshop：
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