Week 3 Tutorial: User Centric Design and Requirement Gathering

During this tutorial we discussed are ideas for the first assignment of helping university students adjust. A potentially effective idea was trying to get students to get more comfortable in class through more group activities, or more events to try and get people together. This idea can help ease the pressure of university as you get to meet people going through the same experience. Once we spilt into smaller groups, this idea developed into a anonymous forum where students do not feel scared to ask questions about the small things. This helps to fill in the gaps in knowledge that first years struggle to find. By making it anonymous it promotes more people to post on the forum as it does it come under your own name, therefore there is not embarrassment associated with your name.

However after discussing the idea further, the anonymous forum can be an addition to a larger idea. The intention of the forum was to help introduce new first years to university life, so this can be done much faster through creating something like a frequently asked questions page focused on first years. Then you can have a anonymous forum on the side of that page. In order to further develop this idea I am going to need to survey students what they want and expect from the frequently asked questions page. One issue I discovered with this idea is the longterm use of it, since it would need to be constantly updated with new information. This would require someone who has experienced the first year experience to provide detailed answers.Overall I have discovered that my simple idea needs more thought and research in order to develop. However I am trying to target what causes the fear or pressure that first year students experience, and then build something from that. As well as look into why people prefer being anonymous when asking questions and the power of being anonymous.

Bibliography:

Dyadmusic.co.uk,. (2015). Retrieved 4 March 2015, from http://www.dyadmusic.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/UnknownCopyrightLicence.png