Brainstorming / Affinity
We held several brainstorming meetings to choose an initial plan of action.
In order to organize our thoughts, we used the affinity diagram technique. Each team member brainstormed questions and issues and wrote them on sticky notes. After about ten minutes, we posted the individual notes on the whiteboard, organizing the questions and ideas into categories. These groups helped us direct our formative discussions about the project.
In our discussion, we decided to begin with research on current digital music products. This gave us the necessary background to understand the problem space as well as related technology that shapes how people use digital music. We also decided to talk to users as soon as possible to get initial data regarding music listening and organization habits and patterns. This brainstorming approach allowed us to get a quick start on what began as a largely undefined problem.
Schedule
Based on the result of our brainstorm, we divided out our 8 months of time into several phases of user research, prototyping and iterative design sessions.
For the first 4 months we concentrated on background and user research, and a lot of design sessions based on the consolidation of what we found from the research. The latter half we continued our work with the cycle of prototyping, user testing and iterative design.
