Telemetry Meeting Notes

5 October 2021

23 August 2021

 

 

26 July 2021

Updates

  • Wrote up user stories in User Stories

  • As team, went over insights from interviews and brainstormed big-picture potential dashboard organization/features in FigJam

  • Pulled out and assigned 4 of the most complex/important user stories

    • Finding/searching for data/filtering – @Riishi Jeevakumar

    • Displaying values vs booleans vs enums & comparing data – @Catherine Burns

    • Displaying Faults – @Cheryl Li

    • Historical data – @Joy He (Deactivated)

Deliverables for next week:

  • Brainstorm as many concepts as you’d like

    • Recommended: diagram out the user flow. This is a sample one I did for a hackathon (a slightly shitty app for crowdsourced leftovers) https://drive.google.com/file/d/19wIMkiZAql_yDnEB4oYsX-W2dzRsfihV/view?usp=sharing – yours will likely be much simpler (only 1 flow for each concept, no subflows)

    • Sketches (can be pen and paper) or wireframes (figma) of 2-3 concepts

      • Remember storyboarding? Ideally the sketches/wireframes would be in some kind of storyboard form, and follow the user flow

      • If you’re strapped for time, a simple sketch communicating each of your concepts will do

Misc

  • I forgot to mention this, but if you see any random stuff in the wild that looks aesthetic, throw it in here Telemetry Dash Moodboard

  • Any random stuff (like Stats Canada) that you think would be good inspo for someone else/the rest of the team, share it over Slack!


19 July 2021

General Updates/what we’ve been up to

  • Wrapping up interviews

    • [list of people we interviewed]

    • Ryan Dancy – Firmware

    • Emma Wai – Strategy

    • Michael Shiozaki – MSXII, Strategy

    • Avery Chiu – Firmware + our main point of contact

    • Aashmika Mali - Hardware, MSXII

    • James Lin – Hardware

    • Hewitt – Firmware

    • Micah Black – Hardware; upcoming

What to do this week

Coming up

  • Interview with Micah Black (hardware lead) at some point this week

  • Next check-in we’ll discuss what we found and begin thinking about how to approach the design

    • ticket-by-ticket approach? how to divide up tickets?

    • subteam-by-subteam approach?

    • other approaches?

  • Iron out timelines some more. Bug Kristen about what she expects us to have done this term.

  • Start moodboarding


5 July 2021

Interview Guides

  • Went over interview guides for firmware and software and gave feedback

  • Iterate on them throughout this week

  • @Joy He (Deactivated) will do interview with Ryan Dancy (firmware lead) this Thursday at 7:00pm

    • Cannibalize questions from other interview guides for this one

    • Rest of us will sit in, take notes, observe

  • Interview scheduled for Sunday July 11 at 1pm with Emma Wai (strategy lead)

    • @Riishi Jeevakumar will run this one, rest of us take notes

Interview Guides Feedback

  • Don’t make assumptions about the current state/usage of the system

    • You don’t know if they’re currently using telemetry, if they’ve done stuff in the past, etc

    • Lead with an open-ended question such as “tell me about your experiences with [thing you want to ask about]” then go into the specific thing you want to investigate

    • Or you’ll get a blank look and “we don’t use this” or “what thing?”

  • When trying to suss out usage patterns, lead with a “scenario-setting” question

    • “What current tasks within MidSun involve data visualization? Tell me about them?”

    • Then go into trying to suss out usage patterns, design patterns, current solutions

    • Forcing people to think of specific scenarios/examples give you richer, more accurate, less speculative answers

  • Pay attention to wording: will the other person know what you’re trying to ask them about? Keep your wording specific.

  • Essentially, ask open-ended (“vague”) questions to find and establish specific tasks/situations/scenarios that are relevant to what you want to know about, then you can drill down

Card Sorting

Technical Req’s

https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/S/pages/2760245765/can+dbc+Breakdown

  • Some stuff still needs to be clarified (tagged in red) ideally by this week

  • Give it a read to give you an idea of the data we’re dealing with, but no need to spend time on it


30 June 2021 (not a meeting)

Action Items for this week

@Joy He (Deactivated)

  • Upload updated technical requirements doc onto Confluence

    • Trawl Confluence for more documentation on unanswered/unknown comments

  • Reach out to interview participants

    • Book interviews starting around July 7 at the earliest (likely later, depending on IG refinement needed)

  • Put together card-sorting exercise

@Joy He (Deactivated) @Catherine Burns @Riishi Jeevakumar @Cheryl Li

  • Upload your finished first iteration of interview guide onto Confluence before Monday’s meeting

  • Monday July 5th may be more of a working session to refine the interview guide

  • Practice-run-throughs would be nice: not sure how to approach them. Let’s discuss.

  • Each person is encouraged to run their own interview session – I’ll sit in as notetaker/get stuff on track if needed

    • Everyone is (more strongly) encouraged to sit in on all the interviews and take notes

  • Potential Task: getting access to MSXII dashboard (since all of you are frontend devs and more savvy with code lmao)


14 June 2021

Started Interview Guide

MSXIV: themes and example questions

1. Introductory

  • Roles

  • Familiarity with IRL races

  • Familiarity with telemetry

2. **Data prioritization* *

  • Data to include

    • Data to not include/hide?

3. Process involved in performing tasks

  • Current data visualization practices (spreadsheets)

    • What sequence/steps would you take to check x?

    • Try to avoid speculative questions here as much as possible

4. Stakeholder stuff

  • How strategy is building it

    • Manage expectations -- what do they know about this project?

5. Think of your own theme!

 

MSXII

1. IRL experience – talk about what the race was like

2. Data prioritization

  • most, least useful data

  • Where could we have cut data

3. Process involved in performing tasks

  • Current data visualization practices (spreadsheets)

    • What sequence/steps would you take to check x?

    • Try to avoid speculative questions here as much as possible

4. Problems with MSXII dashboard

5. Think of your own theme!

 

Next steps

  • Discussed how to split up interview guides

    • split into 4 guides with 1 person on each

      • software, firmware, hardware, msxii

  • MSXII – @Catherine Burns

  • Software – @Riishi Jeevakumar

  • Hardware – @Joy He (Deactivated)

  • Firmware – @Cheryl Li

 

  • Brainstorm as many questions as you can for each theme

  • The questions for soft/firm/hardware/msxii will overlap – that’s great, we want that!

    • Create a page in confluence with your questions

    • Next meeting we can look over each other’s questions, and spend the next week tweaking interview guides based on stuff we liked from other people’s interview guides

  • I will start reaching out to the people we are interviewing

 

  • The technical requirements from the dbc file are coming I swear

    • Currently making Avery look over them


12 June 2021 (pre-meeting notes)

  • Not a meeting

Technical Requirements

  • Firmware gave me a file with all the telemetry outputs :P

    • Single source of truth for everything that telemetry is measuring – super nice lol

  • I’ll be revising the technical requirements doc based on that file by Monday’s meeting

Interview Overview!

  • Goal is to get these done over this month, try to end by July 10 at the latest

I have a list of 6.5 people to interview – I’ll reach out to them over the next two weeks to arrange 0.5-1 hour interviews depending on how the interview guides are going, and how prepared we are.

MSXIV (current): these are all leads

  • Hardware – James Lin

  • Firmware – Ryan Dancy, Mitchell Osler

  • Strategy – Emma Wai

MSXII (past)

  • Aaron Tan

  • Avery Chiu (our main point of contact for questions)

  • Taiping (may not be reachable…hence 0.5)

Who’s using telemetry?

  • Even though we’re only interviewing leads, EVERYONE on hardware, firmware, and strategy are expected to be able to use the telemetry dashboard

  • The leads will know the use cases the best, and will be the people onboarding members to teach them how to deal with telemetry

  • Ideally you’d want to interview “regular” team members, but a) we don’t have names b) none of them will know much.

How will the actual interviews work?

  • One person acts as the “main interviewer” – they will be asking most of the questions and directing the interview

  • The rest of the people listen in on the interview (cameras off) and act as notetakers

    • They are also expected to step in with any questions that they have, and help prompt the interviewer if they’re having trouble

    • It’s good practice to record interviews and go over recordings after the fact. However, it’s very time-consuming and we have multiple people able to take notes – so I don’t want to do it.

      • I will save transcripts/recordings for reference, but we don’t want to fully go over all of them

      • Take good, detailed notes during the interview

      • Don’t do schoolwork/other stuff during the interviews lmao

  • It would be Very Cool if y’all were able to act as the “main interviewer” at least once

    • Really good experience and helps differentiate you as a UX applicant, since most people never get the chance to do research with actual users

    • HOWEVER, the interview guide must be well prepared/fully fleshed out (or I won’t let you do it :P)

Interview Guides

  • I will screenshare one of the interview guides I created for co-op during Monday’s meeting (June 14).

A really structured way to create interview guides: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/interview-guide/

Example interview guide: https://media.nngroup.com/media/editor/2021/02/05/example_interview_guide.pdf

  • Notice that the sample has 5 main research questions/themes. These are your guiding questions that you are seeking to answer. They are BIG and ambiguous.

  • This weekend (June 12/13), try to come up with 5 big questions EACH that you want answered

    • 5*4 = 20 questions total

    • 10 for MSXIV dash (Rishii and Joy), 10 for MSXII dash (Cheryl and Catherine)

    • As a team, we will discuss what questions we want to prioritize (ie if all of us came up with the same question, we likely want to include that question)

  • Next week, flesh out the sub-questions for the big questions/themes we agree on

    • I will try to provide guidance on this if needed, or prompts to help you brainstorm

    • I will also be re-splitting up the interview guides, because I feel that we may need different ones for each subteam using telemetry – let’s discuss Monday

If you want a more comprehensive guide on user research in general (not just interview guides) go through the articles here https://uxrfieldguide.com/

  • Very good introduction on how to conduct user research well

  • Good overview of biases to avoid

 


7 June 2021

  • Go over Technical Requirements doc with Avery

  • Begin user recruitment – get names from Avery, start reaching out to people

  • @Catherine Burns pick one of the tasks below, and slack me if you have any questions!

Interview guides

I plan to run semi-structured interviews: this means that you have a list of questions and topics you want to cover, but you’re not going down the list strictly – otherwise you sound like a robocall and it’s uncomfortable for everyone involved.

You’ll often base your inquiries on something interesting the person says until you’ve wrung out all the info on that line of inquiry, then move on to a question you’ve prepared.

Instead of a strict list of questions, we’ll begin preparing interview guides this week.

[link to resources/example]

 

 

Tasks

People

Tasks

People

Prepare interview guide for users who will be using the MSXIV telemetry dashboard that we design

@Riishi Jeevakumar

@Joy He (Deactivated)

Prepare interview guide for past users of the MSXII dashboard

  • @Joy He (Deactivated) Get everyone Github access to the MSXII dashboard

  • [insert link to confluence page for MSXII interview guide]

@Cheryl Li

@Catherine Burns

 

MSXII - @Cheryl Li

New/Current one - @Riishi Jeevakumar


31 May 2021

Questions/Comments/Concerns!

Questions/Comments/Concerns!

  • Explanation of battery pack layout/architecture would really help

    • What’s a battery pack module?

    • Their pack layout is split into a master/slave box. They want a graphical representation of that

    • They also want physical layout visualization

 

Tasks

People

Tasks

People

Compile list of technical requirements in https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/S/pages/2579628037

  • Went over Telemetry Software/Server, got preliminary list of things they want to have displayed

  • Need to come up with list of questions

  • Fleshing out definitions of technical terms/acronyms

    • create glossary/summary of what each thing means?

    • Create running list of stuff we’re still confused about and need to bug firmware about

 

Begin thinking about user needs

  • Why do they need x feature? What are they using it for?

  • Expanding on the table notes we have right now for each technical feature

@Joy He (Deactivated)

@Cheryl Li

Competitive analysis in https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/S/pages/2567307589

  • Any updates?

  • Continue working on – try to finish this week

  • Focus on other team’s telemetry dashboards if you don’t know where to start

    • How do they organize tabs? Their “overview/summary” page? “Car view”? Ways to create graphs? Ways to visualize battery pack?

  • Take screenshots of other products, and take notes on them

  • UX is all about “taking inspiration” so we’ll likely be looking up other work throughout the design process to see how people visualize x thing

@Riishi Jeevakumar

@Catherine Burns

Timeline stuff???

  • When are midterms? When does the term end for everyone?

  • Midterms are scattered all throughout June

  • July slightly lighter

 

  • I’d like to wrap up the “preliminary research/onboarding” phase by June 21 and begin recruiting folks

  • Interviews until July 10 (if we’re lucky lol)

    • Research can run at the same time as interviews

  • Data analysis – likely in the form of some kind of 2 hour workshop (one-time thing)

  • Mid-July to August will be “actual” designing

 

 

 


Onboarding - (24 May 2021)

Welcome to telemetry!

What is Telemetry?

  • There’s a bunch of instruments/sensors/fancy things in the car

  • They measure like 500 different things

  • Telemetry: this data is recorded and transmitted to the user (on a laptop)

  • The purpose of the telemetry dashboard is to allows us to view historical car data and create new graphs or visualizations as necessary.

  • We need to display all this data in a coherent, legible, usable way

    • [insert screenshot of a line graph with >20 lines that firmware absolutely insisted had to be displayed like that so they could compare everything]

FSGP 2019 Telemetry dashboard

 

Onboarding To-dos for all of you (try to do by [May 31st])

1. Book 1-1s https://calendly.com/joyhe1-1/15min?month=2021-05 – they’re optional, but also highly encouraged: they help me.

  • What do you want to gain from this experience/what are your goals learning/career-wise?

  • What past experience do you have with UX and/or front-end?

  • How many hours do you think you can do each week?

  • What do you need from me?

 

2. Figure out what’s going on (and do some writing…sorry)

  • Data visualization and UX best practices – 1 to 2 hours https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/S/pages/2566553738

    • Google! Find 3 good sources/articles/guides (that other people haven’t found yet).

    • Paste them into the doc and write a short summary of good points for each source you find

    • If you have questions, write them down too! We can research/look into them and write more info on the doc – you can also write them in the May 31st meeting notes

  • Telemetry dashboard – 30 min

 

Individual Tasks (2 people on each) – how long do we need?

Tasks

People

Tasks

People

Compile list of technical requirements in https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/S/pages/2579628037

@Joy He (Deactivated)

@Cheryl Li

Competitive analysis in https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/S/pages/2567307589

  • https://uwmidsun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ELEC/pages/12288061 is a start

  • Telemetry dashboards for other applications (drones? robots? trucking?)

  • Non-telemetry dashboards/data visualization

    • finance/stocks? not sure what else. You look into it!

  • How do other people visualize and manipulate large amounts of complex data?

  • Look into competitive analysis techniques/templates

@Riishi Jeevakumar

@Catherine Burns

Upcoming Tasks

People

Upcoming Tasks

People

Start looking at user needs – we know nothing about this right now

  • User needs is about why do you need voltage? what are you doing with this info? what needs to be more prominent?

  • Think about exploratory interviews

    • What kind of people do you need? – come up with proto-personas, or different roles within the team who need different things from the dashboard

    • What information do you need from each type of person?

  • Come up with more questions! Start organizing them into themes

  • We want to be able to generate jobs to be done, use cases, flows, etc

 

Digging deeper into pain points with existing data visualization solutions

  • Planning for interviews with people who were on MSXII (past dashboard)

    • What kind of people do you need? – come up with proto-personas, or different roles within the team who need different things from the dashboard

    • What information do you need from each type of person?

    • List of questions.

  • Think of other ways to figure out issues with past or existing data visualization/dashboards so we don’t repeat the same mistakes

    • Could get files of the MSXII dashboard, get your peers to look at it and do user testing??? idk

      • Also could do with existing products that you found earlier

 

To-Dos for me @Joy He (Deactivated)

  • Do the To-dos for all of you

  • Bug people about getting access to the actual FSGP2019 dashboard so y’all can poke around

  • Write up summaries of data visualization best practices resources I got from co-op

 

If you have questions/concerns about anything, message the Telemetry Dashboard channel. Your questions will likely help the entire team. You can also DM me!