REPORT-OUT: MAKE-A-THON PROCESS AND PRODUCTS
Background
Our problem statement focuses on figuring out how we can bridge the gap of incompatibility for both students and professors when using Mac and Windows operating systems. Through surveys and varying types of interviews with college students and professors, we were able to conclude that there are indeed more issues involved with those who use Mac OS; Windows still has its fair share of issues, however. It’s also important to note that there is an almost equal split of usage between Mac and Windows within classroom environments. With careful consideration from what we were able to learn from students and professors, we began to brainstorm on how we would combat these unique issues and the given situations for different courses. We concluded that a virtual machine that can be run as a program on any operating system and can be used to load up a virtual Windows operating system would be a liable option to help our audience.
Brainstorming and Prototyping
In the beginning of our process, we engaged in multiple discussions on how we should conduct our prototype process. We wanted to keep in mind key features that should be incorporated into our concept and how they would be reflected. At the same time, we kept revisiting and focusing on the issues we learned from our research and the key points we gained. We know that Windows is a dominant industry standard and that the majority of programs are optimized for Windows. However, we were able to learn that students are using an almost equal split between Windows and Mac operating systems within their classroom environments. This realization made our prototyping task a little more complex since people almost equally use as many Windows as Mac OS. This meant that our prototype would have to consider this split in usage.
We were able to gain momentum for our ideas when engaging in the 10+10 thinking design. This allowed us in a sense to “Step back” and have a look at all of our progress. We were able to acknowledge our current design challenges and compare what we assumed the data would result to and what we actually learned. From here, we began to think about different ideas to potentially address and solve the gap in incompatibility issues between Mac and Windows OS. Everyone in our team proposed an idea and elaborated on how we could expand it. It almost became difficult for us to decide on what solution we should implement as each idea was great but had limitations. From our 10 ideas, we acknowledged 3 that could best be applied to our situation.
The 3 ideas involved using cloud based virtual machines, a resource database that educates and shows users how to run programs properly on their machine, and having colleges provide virtual machine programs for students. We wanted our target audience to be able to have easy access to the program and have it provided with their education as part of their enrollment. We then agreed we would move forward with the idea of having colleges provided virtual machine programs for their students. Following along with our “We Believe” worksheet, we hypothesised that this feature would provide a virtual Windows operating system for students who primarily use Mac operating systems. Our proposed system will achieve lesser technical issues than there usually are on other operating systems besides Windows. If we were right, we should see reports from instructors indicating that there are less issues for them and their students.
Beginning our prototyping process, we reviewed certain ways we could demonstrate our concept. We wanted to be able to show our users the idea of the concept as well as how it would work and the possible situations that would follow along with it. With this in mind, we decided to implement a wireframe that could showcase a scenario of a student using a Mac OS in which they use a virtual machine program to load a digital Windows OS to run a program that only runs on Windows. We believe that this approach will allow for users to fully understand how this concept can help them and be used during their courses. Overall, the visual of the wireframe will allow the user to understand why it's needed.
Furthermore, we had in mind to conduct a role-play, in which we can act out other scenarios of how this concept will be used and implemented in a classroom environment. We intend for this prototype to draw the opinions of the user and to ask questions. We will propose ideas of how it will operate such as; The program can take up to 2 minutes to load, it's optimized for all computers to run smoothly regardless of the hardware, the controls can be altered, etc. This would further the understanding of the concept and what the user should expect to experience when using in real life scenarios.
We intend to further develop our wireframe and create other visuals to demonstrate outcomes for instructors as well. We would showcase that by having this concept implemented, the instructor can focus on only one operating system for the class, which depending on the course, could be Windows. Therefore, a classroom composed of Mac and Windows will have a primary operating system of just Windows.
Thoughts About Testing
To test our prototype, we plan to reach students and instructors in the information science major, or students pursuing a degree in technical major with our prototype. We will observe or record their interaction with the prototype. We want to evaluate the effectiveness of the information provided by our wireframe and understand how it works in practical application. We will ask our users to give us feedback through another interview or questionnaire. We will pay special attention to the feedback of certain indicators from users, such as whether our prototype is sufficiently intuitive and whether the virtual machine can run smoothly. We will revise and improve our prototype again based on user feedback.
We are confident about our idea. This is partially because other schools within UMD, College Park use virtual machines (one example being the Business School using a virtual machine for business versions for Excel). We believe that our prototype will be able to help bridge the gap between different operating systems and users. The visual aids above will be a good way to introduce our prototype to users who have never interacted with a virtual machine before. In conclusion, we believe that having access to virtual machines is the most viable option in technical-centric fields.