“Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction).”
– Don Peck

How I Spent My Time

Based on feedback from my thesis committee, I updated much of the content throughout my thesis website. The main thrust of this update is to narrow and make more clear my thesis statement and consequently re-shape all other supporting content to reinforce the thesis statement.

Noteworthy changes include the Thesis Statement & Abstract, Written Component Overview, Visual Component Overview, thesis website intro page, and the title of the thesis website.

I also bug tested the prototype for user testing and began developing the test cases, questions, and list of potential testers.

What’s Working

Getting feedback and focusing my thesis topic.

What’s Not Working

Being busy with work. :(

Substantial Changes

Narrowed my thesis topic and re-wrote a lot of website content—list of noteworthy changes are in the ‘How I Spent My Time’ section.

“Our brains evolved to assess trade-offs best in the face of immediate, physical needs and threats. Should I run from that predator? Absolutely. Unfortunately, we still have these same brains. That’s why the camel crickets in my crawl space make me flip my shit, but giving my kids’ data to Disney World feels perfectly acceptable.”
– John Foreman

How I Spent My Time

I completed the alpha prototype which is a milestone. I can now begin user testing in earnest.

The live prototype can be viewed via the prototype page. Similarly, video walkthroughs of the prototype are now available for each scenario via their respective page in the scenarios section.

What’s Working

Backing off on the fidelity of the alpha prototype, specifically the content. I wish I would’ve been faster with a lower fidelity—more “impressionistic”—throughout the production of the alpha. Hopefully, the attention to content details will save me time in the final prototype.

What’s Not Working

Adding unplanned scenarios isn’t helping the timeline. I’m now ~3 weeks behind where I wanted to be.

Substantial Changes

Added a new scenario to the prototype.