Week 6, Part 1: Monday, June 26 – Wednesday, June 28

Week 6! Now that we’re in the back half of the summer, we are working hard to get everything done in the last few weeks!

Monday morning I spent time continuing to iterate on my personal website (you can check it out here). I then spent the rest of the day on Monday writing our patient paper. I spent time editing the sections we have already completed (Abstract, Introduction, Related Work, and Methods), and creating a draft of the Results section and our Discussion. By the end of the day we had a full first draft of our paper (yay!) that we are continuing to iterate on and improve.

Tuesday morning I spent more time iterating on the paper, looking for quotes from our patient interviews to included, and rewriting sections of the results. Tuesday afternoon we met with Dr. Shih and Dr. Clawson for our weekly meeting. We discussed the progress we had made in the last week, and then discussed our paper. We talked through different methods of writing our results section, and if it was better to present all of the problems and then all of the solutions or to present a problem then a solution than the next problem and solution pair. We also talked about how we were going to write the Discussion section of the paper, and how we should go about including design suggestions. These are ideas that we as researchers feel should be considered in future designs based off of our interviews with patients. We also discussed our plan for the upcoming focus groups, and they gave us good tips for conducting the focus groups. It was a productive meeting, and we got a lot of good feedback that we can implement into our paper.

Later that day we conducted our focus group beta test, which is when we recruited four REU students to be our “participants” and we practiced setting up and running the focus group. Our focus groups will be run with health care providers, and as our time with them is short and valuable we need to be prepared for when we do run the focus group. My role in the focus group is to take field notes, and write down big ideas as well as any reactions participants may have to questions or the comments of other participants. The practice group went pretty well, and we left confident in our ability to run a group. Special thanks to Max, Meagan, Julia, and Ciabhan for helping us out. Click here to see a picture from our practice focus group.

Wednesday morning we spent time continuing to edit our paper, and we added in the design suggestions to our Discussion section. We then met with Tom to make our game plan. Our plan is to hold off on the Participatory Design study for the fall. Sergio and I will make our wireframes based on the information we get from the focus group study, which will then be used in the participatory design study as part of a process called cognitive walkthrough, where you ask a participant to walk you through the steps of completing a task in the app. We are then going to write a paper which will mention our qualitative analysis of the patient interviews as well as discuss the wireframes we create. We are going to enter this paper in the CHI Student Research Competition, which will require us to submit our paper by January 15, 2018. We will then continue to work with Tom on drafting a Patient paper and a health care provider paper, which will be submitted to CHI, and are due in mid-September.

Now that we have a solid plan in place, we are excited to keep moving forward and working on the project. We have a lot to do, but we will keep moving forward and seeing how much we are able to get done!