The HCI Capstone project is an 8 months long project and it is divided into two phases, the user research phase and the design phase. The first four months of the project, from January to April, was dedicated to the user research.
The first phase began with the team conducting contextual inquiries on 14 users, ranging from IT developers to business users. The users were recruited from different areas of the IT knowledge spectrum to gain enough understanding of every aspect of business processes. The team also conducted background research such as literature reviews, heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis to understand the nature and breakdowns of the business, business processes and business users.
The team consolidated the findings from individual user researches, and created consolidated flow model which represented the flow of communication among consulting/ industry companies, and cultural model which showed influences of one to others. The insights and breakdowns we observed from the consolidated models were carefully integrated into design ideas which addressed the needs the team observed.
Based on the understanding, the team moved to iterative design phase for the second half of the project timeline. Four iterative design validation sessions were conducted before the final working prototype is presented. The first proof of concept session, called Concept Validation, was performed in early-June to validate the observed needs and design ideas evolved from the user research.