Thursday October 12th

It was a good day!

Everybody: You did a great job distilling your positions and progress and delivering all of it quickly and, for the most part, clearly. Whoever suggested the paper notes method of sharing feedback, thank you. That worked great ... especially because everyone participated and shared. As we go forward and share regularly via quick updates I will ask that we keep that system rolling.

Next week (10/19) Jason Vaccarello will join us for the mid-term critique. You're all wondering what exactly we're expecting you to deliver. Well, here it is:

General Guidlines:

• Keep your presentation to 5 minutes.
• Delivery in Google Slides, PDF, or Keynote – Digital is required.
• Please have your file uploaded to the drive by the start of class so that we don't lose time to multiple downloads.
• Gotta include either a video (max 30sec) or an animation (GIF).

Specific Slide Requirements:

Hypothesis: Make sure that you are giving us as much detail as you can on the WHAT, the FOR WHO, and the FOR WHAT REASON (WHY). A lot of you completely left out any description of your target audience (FOR WHO) in your latest hypothesis statements. Any of the insights and details that are informing your design decisions (my user is budget conscious, all existing solutions are ugly, etc) should be alluded to in your hypothesis. Please remember this is not the same kind of statement as your thesis statement.

Your Community: We have not looked at examples of illustrating this in class. Of course you can make "persona" slides to introduce us to the demographic profile of your target user. But I'm hoping you can try to take a crack at illustrating a "map" of your community in another way: In the middle of the page, there you are in a little bubble. Surrounding you are all of the major audience segments that you believe will be most likely to want your solution. In between each group and you (the nucleus) exists an exchange –– something flows from you to the group: the value that you are supplying; and something flows from the group to you, likely, money. The value is not simply "the product" ... the value is what the product solves for your user and the reason why it is worth buying.

Your Product/Solution: Give us your best yet visualization of what your product looks like. And show us how it works or how it behaves in a typical use-case. This is really the spot where I want to see that required GIF or video.

Competitive Positioning: Make your competitive matrix easy to read. Rethink the criteria that you juxtaposing to the competitors; are those the most important categories upon which to compare your solution to others?; are the competing solutions that you've chosen the most appropriate? List your solution at the top of the list. Only use one kind of icon to fill the cells of the grid. Make this as pleasant looking and easy to digest as possible; one look at this and we should see the "gaps" in other solutions as well as the full array of benefits that make your offering more "complete" than what is already out there.

Your Pre-launch Schedule: In your mind, for your project, what milestones do you need to achieve to have a ready to launch project before Winter break.

Anything Else: Whatever else you show, make sure it has a purpose and that you're not simply work for work's sake. If you show us prototypes, explain what you learned from those trials and how those are informing the "final" design. If you show us trend material, clearly explain how that trend material is shaping/informing your design. If you show us a survey, good god, introduce your sample group ... who did you survey?! Every slide you show should help us to understand the decisions you are making and the decisions that you have yet to make.