Here are tips for tips for your Individual Assignments and Team Assignments.

Coming up with product ideas out of thin air and leading a discussion could be hard. The following frameworks may help you. Think of these as templates for ideation when you are working on your assignments. Be careful in using these templates; they are just tools, and you should not be afraid of thinking outside of what the template asks you to think. And note that what you come up with through ideation is not final; actively scrap or refine knowledge about users, their goals, and ideas for the solutions as you learn more about them through a design process.

The Guide for Ideation

Users-Solutions-Alternatives

For your term project, you have to think for whom you want to design a software system for from scratch. You might feel lost and think "what do I have to consider when I am coming up with project ideas?" When you are ideating, try to think at least three things: users, solutions, and alternatives.

• Users. Try to think of the audience that you want to help with the digital product that you will design. These are your hypothetical users. Think about their characteristics, tasks that they perform, challenges that they face, and what they want to achieve. At the beginning, your target audience could be anyone; they could be from from "wheelchair users who want to find accessible ways in unfamiliar places", "researchers trying to outsource digital data collection for training machine learning models", "cafe owners who want to promote their store effectively", and "small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners who are looking for available support during an economic downturn."
• Solutions. Think of as many solutions that might be able to address the hypothetical users' needs. It could be from "a location-based service that shows an accessible path from point A to point B for a wheelchair user" to "a system that allows a researcher to easily set up a user interface to collect data for training machine learning models".
• Alternatives. Explore how the hypothetical users might be achieving their goals or solving the problems currently. Think of what technical and non-technical methods they are using to perform their tasks.

Once you ideate users, solutions, and alternatives, conduct literature review to see if your hypothetical users exist. You may be right that, say, there are "wheelchair users who want to find accessible ways in unfamiliar places." However, it is equally likely that your hypothesis is wrong and there are no such users. Read and study new articles, corporate and government reports, and research papers to support (or refute) that your hypothetical users actually exist. Likewise, conduct literature review to study what alternative solutions exist to support the users.

Polish and organize your ideas using value proposition canvas and SWOT that are described below.

Value Proposition Canvas

Once you have brainstormed ideas for potential users and solutions, you should organize the ideas so that you can effectively communicate "how your solution addresses the users' needs." You could use a value proposition canvas to organize your thought.

• Users. On the left, you should describe one of your potential audience. Fill out the cells marked as "User", "Goals/Gains", and "Breakdowns/Pains". In the "User" cell, you should describe the characteristics of the target users for whom you want to design a software system. Think, for example, "what is his/her occupation?" and "what does s/he need to accomplish in their daily live?" Then fill out "Goals/Gains" and "Breakdowns/Pains". Goals could be "he wants to accomplish his work efficiently" or "she wants to achieve something that she could not achieve previously." Breakdowns are something that are preventing them from achieving their goals.
• Solution. On the right of the canvas, describe one of your potential solutions. Explain what is your solution in the "Solution" cell. Explain how your solution help the user in achieving their goals in the "Gain Creators" cell. Describe how your solution addresses/mitigates the user's breakdowns and pains in the "Pain Relievers" cell.

As you start describing about your hypothetical user and solution, you would notice some parts need more digging. Maybe you did not think enough about how the solution helps achieve the user's goals. It is a sign that you need to think more.

Presenting Your Persona and Scenario

Journey Map

A journey map visualizes how a persona or personas follows a scenario over time. Its role is similar to storyboarding that we discussed in the Requirements lecture note; it provides a high-level overview of the scenario and how it progresses over time. While a storyboarding heavily uses pictorial information (pictures and sketches) to communicate how a scenario progresses, a journey map is more text-based. If you want to quickly communicate the overview of a scenario to others (e.g., in a report), consider using either a storyboard or a journey map.