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Brainstorming and Storyboarding

Sriram Mohan

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Outline

Background Barriers to Elicitation

Techniques Brainstorming Storyboarding

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Three Common Barriers

“Yes, But…” Syndrome Develop techniques to get rid of the “But” early.

Undiscovered Ruins Syndrome “the more you find, the more you know” --> find the right

balance User and Developer Syndrome

Communication gap between the users.

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Outline

Background Barriers to Elicitation

Techniques Brainstorming Storyboarding

Phases of Brainstorming

Idea Generation Idea Reduction

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Encourages participation by all Allows participants to build on one another's ideas High bandwidth: many ideas in short period of time Encourages out-of-the-box thinking

Benefits

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One Brainstorming Method

Write down ideas on post-it notes, put on wall Read ideas out loud Capture ideas in person’s own words Generate as many ideas as possible No criticizing! Take turns being the facilitator

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A Similar Method

Use an easel or whiteboard Ask for ideas and write them down as they are said aloud Once again - no criticizing!

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Idea Reduction

Prune ideas…,

After the crazy and wild ones disappear Give one-line description for each remaining idea Classify the ideas into groups

Idea Reduction…

But there are situations, where not all ideas can be taken forward, in this case we have to choose the ideas that we take forward. How do we do this?

Vote on the ideas (i.e. rank them) Prioritize the ideas

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Web based brainstorming

Using the internet to facilitate the brainstorming in a collaborative way.

Is this useful? Why? How do we do it?

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Practice Brainstorming

Idea Generation(7 minutes) Lets generate ideas for features, requirements,

enhancements, user interfaces or anything that you would like to see on our sample project. Please raise your hand and point out your ideas.

Once we are done lets practice Idea Reduction (10 Minutes) Eliminate Invalid Ideas One line description Voting

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Outline

Background Barriers to Elicitation

Techniques Brainstorming Storyboarding

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Story

Who are the players? What do they do? How do they do it?

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Get the idea from some Storyboard Examples

More movies --This one’s from Blade Runner

In the movie industry, storyboarders don’t think they get enough credit – See www.tipjar.com/dan/colomba.htm

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Another Storyboard Example

More movies – Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

Storyboard from Storyboarding 101, by James O. Fraioli. Michael Weise Productions, 2000, ISBN 0-941188-25-6.

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Another Storyboard Example

From software & web development. This one’s “Understanding your automobile,” at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/authoring/studio/guidebook/storyboard_example.html

You can check out their website for more about their methodology and templates…

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Key Points

Purpose – Elicit “Yes, But” reactions

Storyboards should be sketchy A place to add innovative content

Above, right – “At the forefront of innovative content, interactivity is valuable only if it is user-friendly.”From www.rthk.org.hk/ mediadigest/md0001/04.html

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Storyboard Types

Passive Rough Sketches, screen shots

Active Flash movie, linked PowerPoint presentation.

Interactive Realistic, and a live prototype

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Advantages of Storyboard

Inexpensive User friendly, informal, interactive Provides an early review of user interfaces of the system Easy to create and easy to modify

Scenarios

Scenario is a narrative describing foreseeable interactions of types of users (characters) and the system or between two software component

Used in usability research Famous example

As we may think? - Vannevar Bush

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Extra Credit

Extra Credit 1: What are the tradeoffs on scenarios when compared to use cases and storyboards? Can we use them in gathering requirements? Turn it in using Angel (Lessons – Weekly Content – Week 02 – Day 02 – Scenario’s Extra Credit)

Team Extra Credit 1: Provide storyboard diagrams for your project as a part of Milestone 2. It will be worth 25 points towards your teams Milestone 2 grade.

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Special Extra Credit

Write a report on the “As we may think” article. This will be due on Monday the 17th of September by class time. Please email your reports to me. It is worth a lot more than 10 points.

The report should provide Synopsis of the article Your perspective on the article

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