Meeting – 04/07/09

We had a short meeting today in which we divided all responsibilities for deliverables:

All paper parts due on Google Docs by Friday night.  Visualizations due by
Thursday / Friday

Sub-team will do final composition of paper on the weekend.
Saturday 4:30 PM online meeting

Outline for presentation prior to Sunday’s meeting – Andrew

Initial meeting for presentation on Sunday (6:00 PM at AMER’s on Church St.)
Meeting on Monday (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM at AMER’s on Church St.)

Presentation Monday night 5:00 PM 409 West Hall  !!!!

Introduction – Jason

Visualizations – Aakash / Gaurav / Moon
Describing how the data is being represented and why.

Budgeting / Return on Investment – Andrew

Mitigation of Risk – Aakash
Legal liability

Conclusion – Rachel
Can we count on your support???

Bibliography – Rachel

And we even developed the beta version of our mock-up for HR:

Human Resources Interface

 

Twine is born!

Gaurav and Aakash have completed our alpha mock-up for Project Twine!

Human Resources Employee Screen

Employee Interface

We have partitioned the paper and other work for the deliverables:

1. Andrew, Rachel and Jason are working on the paper this week
- Jason working on the “Our Solution”
- Rachel working on literature review
- Andrew working on Budgeting and ROI
2. Moon, Aakash, Gaurav working on the visualizations this week

 

Meeting 03/26/09

During our meeting, Jason showed his brief powerpoint presentation about the “magic” or system design of Twine.  We also addressed many of the topics and issues we uncovered and have been working on thus far.  We covered the following:

1. See where everyone’s at with their subtasks (Aakash & Guarav =
Visualizations; Rachel & Andrew = client UI; Jason & Moon = Magic)
2. Decide on “unified” UX for consistancy sake (Gaurav, I think you’d be
a good candidate to do this) between client UI and the various
visualizations
3. Determine who needs Photoshop help to get some mockups ready to go. It
will be up to each group to ask for help and determine times
4. Determine deliverables for next week (I think we should start to draft
the final paper, continuing with what we have on Google Docs).

Our first Twine mock-up is complete:

User Prompt Widget

Additional Media  below.

 

March Madness Meeting

We met today to create an outline for the paper deliverable and in order to discuss some sketch ideas for visualizations.

More images after the jump.

 

High-level System Design Meeting

After meeting with Dr. Winfield, Jason and Moon proceeded to develop a high-level system design for Twine.  Essentially this is a brief overview of the guts, or inner workings, of the system that can be approached broadly and practically with sufficient time and resources.  Shown below is the diagram generated from our meeting:

Our high-level design schematic for Twine

Meeting minutes are given below.

 

Group Meeting 2/10/09

Team Twine met in order to combine our research efforts over the past few weeks.  First Jason and Moon described the results of Dr. Winfield’s interview (soon to be posted).

Rachel and Andrew presented the results from their meeting concerning the incentivation and motivation of microblogging in the enterprise, as well as client-side user experiences.

• Name displays and public recognition for contribution
• Options for anonymity and privacy options

Aakash and Gaurav presented their findings about user interfaces for HR and clients.

For employees:

• Auto-completion possibilities
• Provide feedback and contextual actions
• Easily accessible (i.e. integrated) interface and subsystems
• Limitations to prevent excessive use and potential for abuse
• Rewards for contributions

For HR:

• Information aggregation provided over historical time frames (monthly, weekly, etc.)
• Critical mass of information should engender action
• Visualizations should provide apt information (long-term tracking, live feeds, morale rating, graphs)
• Critical mass itself should be deterministically calculated and respond possibly organically to user input

Moon and Jason’s findings will be posted in the next topic.  Minutes after the jump.

 

Interview with Dr. Winfield – 2/10/09

Jason and Moon met with Dr. Winfield, the manager of the UHS at the University of Michigan, to determine the value and potential efficacy of a system such as our proposed Twine.  Overall, Dr. Winfield indicated that a system like Twine may present itself as a distraction to employees, and despite any benefits that he would be resistent to adopt any technology with the potential to act as a distraction.  However, we were able to assess a few salient points introduced by Dr. Winfield:

• Security is a potent issue for any organization and particularly those in the health industry
• Anonymity would annul HR’s ability to respond to individual concerns
• Introduce sampling techniques to elucidate information from noise
• Distraction is a significant problem that needs to be addressed

Dr. Winfield also gave us contact information for Tim Wood, Senior HR Director for UM who might be willing to sit down for an interview with our team.  Minutes are given below.

 

Meeting 2/3/09

In this meeting, Aakash and Rachel revealed the results of their research over the last week.  In summary:

Aakash

• Tweetscan – “Improve your signal/noise ratio”
• Re-tweet Radar
• Comcast utilizes tweets externally
• Enterprise tweet mining; shows that companies use microblogging to assess employee states

Rachel

• Computer aided interviewing gives support for anonymized tweeting and weighting of responses
• Privacy risks include: adherence to record-keeping, undercutting potential gains, anonymous tweets
• Twine would give employees a soapbox on which to announce grievances
• Employee motivation and attitude is variant and can be better addressed through something like Twine
• Reasons for HR failure: user involvement, HR is underutilized and not consulted, a social and information perspective
• Employee reward system – a behavior-based recognition program
• Myth: that employee camaraderie engenders a reduction in complaints
• Possible metrics for HR success: operational cost reduction
• Argue for release of HR statistical information
• HR dilemma: how to balance managing the bottom line while providing employee-centered services

The previous night, we were able to redraw our diagram for Professor McCord.  The fruits of our labor:

A refined diagram for Twine.

Action Points:

• New meeting time: 4:30pm on Tuesday.

• Andrew will make room arangements.

• Rachel and Andrew will be working on client UX

• Aakash and Gaurav will be working on what HR sees.

• Jason and Moon will be working on the “Magic” behind the scenes.

• Jason and Moon will meet with Dr. Winfield on Monday.

 

Meeting 1/28/09

This meeting included a brainstorming session during which we fleshed out our vision for the project.  The culmination of our thought processes is represented in the following picture taken after our mental assault:

Our initial concept of Twine

Minutes after the jump.

 

Meeting 1/26/09

Our initial meeting after deciding upon our topic went smoothly.

Items Discussed:

1. Group member responsibilities
2. Weekly meetings
3. Research roles
4. Deliverables

Action Items:

1. Andrew and Moon joined the group. Welcome!
2. Rachel suggested the name “Twine” for our product: Twitter + whine. Brilliant!
3. Andrew will send out e-mail with their e-mail addresses, and each Andrew and Moon will make sure they are part of the EnterpriseTwits google group.
4. Andrew will reserve one of the SI study rooms for our weekly meetings.
5. Our weekly meeting will be on Wednesday from 3-5.
6. Moon and Jason will be going into an HR dept to collect primary research data. Will present meaningful information to the group on Wednesday, the 4th.
7. Aakash and Rachel will continue doing their literature review and present meaningful information to the group on Wednesday, the 4th.
8. Jason will contact Information Visualization class to see if there is the possibility of cross-course collaboration for the information visualization bit.
9. Moon is going to set up the “Twine” wordpress blog to document our process. (Sounds familiar..)
10. Our deliverable will be an “interactive” presentation of a mockup of our system with a demonstration of the system itself and a walk through of our design process.
11. Next meeting is Wednesday, the 28th @ 3pm.
12. Everyone will come to the next meeting with visions of how and what the system that we’re proposing is… just to get the ball rolling.

Meeting ended @ ~8:10pm.