Week 5 – Quarters

The past week has been a really busy one for us as we prepared for our Quarter Presentations. Quarters comprises of walkarounds, in which faculty visit our project rooms in groups and spend 15 minutes listening and asking questions, and sitdowns, in which interested faculty individually spend 30 minutes discussing our project and giving more detailed feedback.

To recap, we had previously settled on 3 main deliverables for our project:

1. Synthetic interview
   Basis of client’s grant, needs to be able to support open ended questions. Answers to the questions need to come from the existing video our client provided us with.
2. Hypertext FAQ
   This is our compromise for the synthetic interview. We’ll compile a list of FAQs, and selecting a question will bring the user to a specific section of the video. Ideally, we will just deliver this in place of the synthetic interview, but grant requirements are tricky business.
3. Extension of myCORA
   This is where we feel most of the innovation will happen, and also what we’re most excited about. We hope to pull data from MyCORA, a prognosis tool for doctors, and present it to the users, allowing them to play around with their lifestyle factors (e.g. smoking) and see their statistics change.

Interestingly enough, almost all the feedback centered around the synthetic interview deliverable.

As mentioned in last week’s post, the video our client provided for cutting up into chunks for the synthetic interview leaves a lot to be desired. As such, it was no surprise to us that every single faculty who came by felt that we had to reshoot the video, or at least some parts of it, if we wanted it to be effective at all.

Another concern was how we were using the term “synthetic interview” – what we were describing felt more like an interactive, Microsoft Clippy, kind of video. We actually agreed with them on this, but had taken to calling this part of the project a synthetic interview as that was what our client called it and we didn’t want to have multiple terms for a single deliverable.

The faculty also echoed our concerns about our client’s wish to make the synthetic interview be open ended, where the user could ask any question they wanted.

Lastly, the other really important piece of feedback was to carefully consider if we were going to make a web or iOS app for this. An iOS app would be huge, considering the number of video clips we already have and how our client wants to be able to add on to it in future. A web app solves this problem by loading the videos only when required, but creates the problem of requiring an internet connection, which we cannot assume the users have. A web app is also much easier to develop and can be viewed on other non iPad devices, but doesn’t give us as much control as compared to a native iOS app.

Here are the slides which we used for our presentation: