Setting Design Foci

After our concept validation session, the team was faced the challenge of transforming 41 diverse concepts into one single coherent system. In order to help us moving forward, we plotted out all the concepts along the timeline of a business process lifecycle.

We noticed that most of the best received ideas fell around the later part of business process design phase, where the processes get modeled with concrete specification and evaluated against the business users needs. We visualized that there is a great opportunity in designing a composite application design-time tool that integrated with user's current practice of business process modeling and testing.

We then prioritized a number of high-level key features in our system that was extracted from our original 41 concepts:

Initial Wireframes (P0) and Feasibility-Novelty Map

In order to shape our chosen features into a concrete definition of the system, we first had each individual team members sketched some lo-fidelity wireframe for the key features mentioned in previous section. This method allowed us to provide a ground in discussing how all the different features can be pulled into one system and act together coherently.


Some examples of the wireframe sketches.

Through wireframing, we realized that each key feature is extremely rich in its very own design space. Given the time we have for the project, it was inevitable for us to further prune down the scope of our design. Our team leveraged the method of cost-value matrix to help evaluate the features. Tailoring to our project goal, we replaced cost and value with feasibility in terms of both prototype implementation and user acceptance and novelty of the idea. The evaluation process involved three steps:

  1. Each team member spatially placed each key feature in the form of sticky notes onto the feasibility-novelty matrix based on his or her own perception.
  2. The team averaged the placement of all the stickies representing the same feature.
  3. The team selected the features that are in the quadrant of high feasibility and high novelty.


The Feasibility-Novelty Matrix

Finally, we came to the following three focused features: