Tuesday - UX Course by Wizeline. (2)

Sprint is a methodology used to find solutions to problems in just five days. Jake Knapp divided the chapters of his books by days of the week; Monday is all about planning, defining the problem, and choosing an objective, Tuesday is the time when we start looking for ideas to solve the problem.

The day is divided in just two sections. The fist part is all about mixing and improving actual solutions that exist to similar problems. If the problem you chose is about the medical industry, you are going to have to research about actual hospitals and clinics that already cover your problem. When you have identified some references, you will have to try to make it better somehow. The next step is to find a way to get all these good ideas and try to apply them on your project. What we’re looking forward is to get a functional prototype. After focusing on a specific part of the problem, and looking through all the possible existent solutions we can start designing some possible solutions.

The second phase of the Tuesday talks about designing possible solutions for the problem. The book shows us that you don’t have to have any expensive tools to start making designs for projects, and how drawing helps you to understand what you really want to achieve with your solution. We learned about the Crazy-8 method, where in only 8 minutes, you have to draw 8 sketches of possible solutions and make them as different as possible, this will help you to understand what are the most important features of the solution you want to implement.

In the next phase, you have to draw a story, so you can see how an user would interact with the solution, if it is not easy to understand, it will be useless, and we want our solution to be adopted.

It is important to design before starting to implement, maybe you don’t have a clear idea of what you are really looking forward, or maybe it would not help to solve the problem you wanted to. It is cheaper to correct a design than to correct a finished solution.

Monday - UX Course by Wizeline. (1)

I had the opportunity of taking a course given by Wizeline team members as one of my last subjects in my major. I had to do some summaries of the Sprint book by Jake Knapp.

The book covers some of the same subjects we discussed last class. It touches on some similar examples, using the serving robot as the introduction example and the Apollo 13 and the maps for the Monday chapter. The book lets you to understand the problems by guiding you step by step. The Monday is all about planning. I agree with the concept that if you want to develop a real solution for a problem, you have to start by defining the end points and goals of it. If you have all the goals well defined, and the population determined, it becomes easy to map all the steps you will have to take to get to the solutions.

Right now I am in an Honors Social Entrepreneurship course and I’ve been complementing my knowledge with it. I realized how important it is to get advices from an expert. In my course my team and me are covering the topic of child malnutrition, and we went to the Organización de Nutrición Infantil (ONI) to talk to the director about the common, and we got a lot of leverage in comparison to other teams.

I believe that every project should implement a “Monday” on its basis. Brainstorming is a helpful tool that helps a team to be on the same page and to start thinking outside of the box. My UX team decided that we are going to be taking over the mobility problem here at the Tec de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara. When I was in high school, we actually had a workshop where, people from the government and the ITESM taught us about these topics, and the possible solutions they had come for it in the past, so I recalled that talk for our activity.

I didn’t disagree with anything in particular. I just thought that you can be a little more flexible with the schedules, but I loved the idea of using all the designed time to work for working, with no distractions. Nowadays, cellphones, laptops and tablets are more of a distraction than tools.

SPRINT is a methodology that looks forward to use all the invested time in the most effective way possible. The solution of problems should follow a structured order, so the answers given have the ability to transcend and to ACTUALLY solve the problem. Defining the objective is the key for a team to get great ideas and to start the conversation of the topic. I am looking forward to learn more about the SPRINT method on the next few weeks.

Make Your Online Identity Safe Again (10) - I Will Tell You A Secret.

The confidentiality concept of the app is also very important. The user must feel like we are respecting its privacy, he/she has to feel protected and that his/her information will remain on secret for the rest of the world. It is true that you leave a trace when you are on the Internet, deleting your browsing history will not erase the fact that you entered a website. Imagine that your trace is like walking on wet cement, your steps will stay there forever.

But that is way different than keeping Confidentiality. Privacy is helping the user to feel comfortable giving those steps, and that only trust worthy people have access to see them, at the end of the day, we have to walk to make our lives worthy.

We encrypted the footsteps, so if anyone tries to look through them, they will not see human footsteps, they could end up seeing pterodactyl steps or something like that. The kids and the teachers will have access to the app by using their IDs and passwords, and we'll have a back up for the information. saved under key.

I really hope my analogy helped to understand confidentiality a little better.

Make Your Online Identity Safe Again (9) - Open and Free.

Ken asked us to take a picture of what open meant to us. I believe that the Internet is the most open door we have. It gives us the opportunity to express ourselves, to research about any topic in the world. The problem with a door being open, is that you can pass through it both ways, let's be careful when entering to it.

Make Your Online Identity Safe Again (8) - On Data Integrity

We'll start this post by defining what is data integrity. It is the maintenance, assurance of the accuracy and consistency of  the entire data life-cycle. It should be considered as a critical point in the design, implementation and usage of any application which uses data (a.k.a. any system).

We ordered the information we're managing by using a relational database, using MySQL. Our system in general is pretty simple, we used JavaScript to fetch all the information, and we used a linear regression algorithm to predict some possible outcomes of the students. Our database is pretty simple. We just have the name of the students, their password, school number, their birthday, their past grades and the results they might achieve while playing the game. The primary key is their school number, we won't actually show that to them, because we think that they could forget it.

We made the sign in very kid-friendly. They will be able to sign in by using their names, and a password that will not be posted here ( haha ). As I've written before, all the information is mounted on an Amazon Web Services Server.

I really hope no one tries to attack our software, but if they try to, if won't be easy for them.