design | Grockit

Design Deliverables for Agile Planning & Development: A Clickable Collection of Mock-ups

By arena reed posted April 2, 2009

We’ve tried a few different approaches to communicating design at Grockit. Our process is constantly evolving but I feel like we’ve reached an ah-ha moment so I thought I would share in case there are any designers out there working with agile development teams that might benefit from what we’ve learned.

In a nutshell, we create a clickable psuedo-site (“click-thru”) that is interlinked as needed to communicate interactions. The index of the click-thru is the go-to place whenever we want to reference a design. In my experience, this has proved superior to attachments-to-Tracker-stories or a folder of flats because it seems to be easier to find things and most importantly it lets me demonstrate interactions and conditional changes.

I also use the click-thru as a place for collaborative exploration. For me, it’s inspiring to make changes to something that teammates will notice. It speeds up the feedback loop and increases the amount of encouragement I get, which makes me happy and more productive, so I make more mock-ups, …etc. One example of using the click-thru for experimentation is the layout and content of the Game Lobby, in the click-thru right now the SAT lobby is different than the GMAT lobby, one represents the next incremental design while the other represents a future version many iterations away. Note: the click-thru is always delivered with the expectation that not all the links will work, and it is almost always presented with narration.

Tools to create the click-thru and to communicate the plans we derive from it are:
* Adobe Fireworks
* Dropbox
* SubEthaEdit
* Pivotal Tracker

To maintain the click-thru we set up Fireworks files with slices over buttons that lead to other pages. When a flow is mocked-up and linked together we then export html and images. Since we use Dropbox and everybody shares the folder the update gets shared with no extra effort on my part. Then we write stories collaboratively with SubEthaEdit …and usually modify the mockup while we are writing the stories. We import the stories into tracker and then the team assigns points to the stories with the click-thru for reference.

The click-thru then becomes a reference for implementation that is still malleable and can be used as a starting point for further collaboration if we discover a more compelling alternative. Alan, Lane and Tim from Cooper Interactive stopped by our office recently to check-out our style of Agile and they asked if we keep the click-thru up to date if we make changes during the implementation process. If we change the design slightly during implementation we will not update the click-thru, it’s simply an artifact at that point and the application itself is the current iteration of the design. I’ll only update that section of the click-thru if we are building something more on top of it in a subsequent iteration.

What will be especially interesting is to see how this process evolves with more than one designer at Grockit. If you know a designer (maybe you?) interested in working in an agile environment, please get in touch.

No Comments »

Peer-powered or data-driven?

By Ari Bader-Natal posted February 9, 2009

playerperformance What is XP, and what does it mean? What is a Grockit Point, and where does it come from?

In answering these frequently-asked questions, I’ll aim to share a few of the ideas behind the learning platform that we’re building.

Experience Points (XP) and Grockit Points (GP) are two different types of rewards available in Grockit games. Try playing for a little while, and you’re likely to earn some of each. A cursory explanation is that XP is awarded by the system based on your response accuracy, while GP is awarded by your peers when they find that you’ve been particularly helpful.¹ The idea here is to reward players both for learning and for teaching. In motivating collaborative learning among peers, our two reward systems were designed to play complementary roles.

What I find particularly interesting about the XP and GP metrics are the way in which they reflect our two-part approach to facilitating learning: Grockit is peer-powered and data-driven.

The value of collaborating with others cannot be under-estimated. In an upcoming blog post, I’ll discuss in more detail research on the beneficial effects of well-structured peer collaborations on learning. For now, I’ll just mention a few aspects of peer-powered learning that we’d be hard-pressed to replicate with a purely data-driven approach: Your Grockit peers can provide encouragement and moral support, they can offer immediate feedback to your various questions, and they share your interest in a common learning goal. Grockit collaborations often span the globe, giving you the opportunity to learn and incorporate different problem-solving techniques and approaches. Please feel free to share in a comment your own experience with peer-powered learning in Grockit.

While the GP system reflects our valuing the power of learning with peers, the XP system reflects our value for data-driven approaches towards understanding and improving systems. Experience points are awarded for performance, and takes into account both response accuracy and problem difficulty. We’re using Item Response Theory to distill our growing database of information down to a probabilistic model of response accuracy for each Grockit question. Our first step towards incorporating this into the learning experience is in determining the XP value of each question based on the parameters of the Item Response Theory model that we’ve constructed based on single-player game response data. We’re looking forward to introducing several interesting new features based on the IRT modeling work in the upcoming months. Subscribe to this blog to guarantee that you’ll catch our upcoming announcements…

These are a few of the ways that the scoring systems in Grockit give a glimpse of the bigger picture here at Grockit, where we believe that a learning environment can be both data-driven and peer-powered.

¹ Each question has an XP value associated with it, based on the difficulty of the question for previous Grockit players. If you answer the question correctly, you earn that many points. If you answer it incorrectly, you lose half that many points. As for GP, when you find that another person’s comments were particularly helpful to you, click the star next to that comment. They will then receive one Grockit Point.

1 Comment »

Should The Basketball Score Board Delay Before Updating?

By farbood nivi posted May 21, 2008

Growing up, the score at the bottom of the screen of a Basketball game would update about a second or so after you looked down at it. And, as you didn’t look down until you saw what looked like a legitimate basket, there was a flow.

1. Notice the basket
2. Look down to bottom of screen
3. Watch the score change

Lately, probably because of advances in technology, the score often updates before you look down. You can be left staring and waiting and sometimes not really knowing whether the current score is the updated score or the pre-basket score. You can end up staring longer than you would had the score been delayed a second, allowing you to look down.

So, from a UI perspective, should there be a 1 second delay in the update of the score on the screen? Would one test this? How?

8 Comments »

SXSWi '08 Roundup

By michael buffington posted March 25, 2008

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I’ll say it again: SXSW was bigger this year than ever, both in terms of attendees and in the quality of speakers and panels. My SXSW this year started off on the best foot possible. I got to join a cast of awesome people in presenting horribly bad website ideas and it was a total blast. We packed a huge room, made people laugh, and we over the pre-talk dread early on and were able to ride the high of a good talk for the rest of the conference.

And now, while the high is starting to fade, two prominent conclusions are standing out in my memory. I’ll summarize both for now with some deeper blog entries about these conclusions to follow shortly.

First conclusion: games are, for the most part, changing the world in positive ways, but we’re only barely able to wrap our heads around what’s possible.

Second conclusion: there are no users. There are only people. People are intelligent, creative, critical, vocal, quiet, lost, frustrated, reasonable, irrational, tired and excited. Using words like “users”, “mobs”, “teams”, “crowds”, or any other collective sort of word doesn’t help designers build applications that should ultimately be designed to augment and amplify the abilities of a single person.

For a taste of what’s to come, consider my first conclusion and then spend some time at World Without Oil. I can’t say there won’t be a pop quiz later.

Thanks to Kathryn Yu taking a panorama of my fellow presenters while David Hornik mocked all of ideas in typical VC fashion.

No Comments »

Doing Things The Wrong Way

By david marino posted May 9, 2007

Here is some insight from James Dyson, the inventor of the amazing Dyson Vacuum.

In Fast Company, He advocates doing things the wrong way.

I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it
right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s
how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always
thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures
they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of
failures to get there is probably more creative…

We’re taught
to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that
other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a
failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty,
dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely
different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a
bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.

It makes you realize that so much of our world view is shaped on “winning.” The war in Iraq, the war on terror, the war on drugs. You wage war to win. War has a winner and loser. Are we setting ourselves up to be losers?

The same is true for education. We all have our childhood horror stories about the way our teachers mishandled situations leaving us slightly jaded. We all have studied for tests, did our best, but come up short and lost. It is a feeling that leaves you wrecked. It wasn’t the actual losing that hurt, it was the implication. In school, you lost credibility, you lost your ranking, you might be downgraded amongst your peers…or your mentors might see you as a loser.

Despite the same path to success, we don’t give enough attention to the lessons that Thomas Edison taught us about the importance of failure. Although, after just a short time working with Grockit, I don’t need to use the ugly word failure. I have seen the light. I have been enlightened to what this really is….

This is called Learning.

Failing and working to first understand the failure, and then to secondly correct the mistake all in the pursuit of learning.

We need to stop being afraid of failure. It is at times the first step in Learning. It is an indicator and guide for “Grok-ing something.”

Allow yourself a chance to fail, it feels good. It reminds you that you are human…and that what makes humans so damn special is our desire to learn, improve… and one day walk on the moon…(again.)

(Here is a personal note:)
After watching my beloved Pistons win the Championship in 2004, I watched them come close for 2 straight years…both failing to win the coveted prize. The mistakes they made over two years have become a roadmap this season. It is exciting to watch this team play so well together knowing that this cohesion is because of a shared philosophy to learn from prior mistakes. I catch myself waiting for a mistake to be committed, the way they did last year — and I am pleasantly surprised every time. Do you think they liked losing? Do you think they liked swallowing the reality that they were talented enough to win, but not organized enough to win? They could have quit, they could have stopped caring. Hell, even Ben Wallace left because I think he got bored, lost faith, didn’t want to learn from mistakes in the past, but instead thought a change of scenery might make it all better. I hope he enjoys his new view, because I think that with this road map which is landmarked with failure the Pistons will be sending him packing in a few short games.

No Comments »