Assignment #1 – Pitch Your Project

Who is your user group?
Our user group are law students who have to discuss legal issues. The app can also be used by other people engaging in law subjects who want to check a legal issue.

What is the exact problem?
Studying law is very learning-intensive. Because of the massive amount of content it is very easy to loose track of things.
When checking a legal issue (which is a very common task throughout university) you have to proceed in a structured way. To do so, there are standardized test schemes. Those test schemes are highly variable and nested. In certain cases some points are more important than others, some also may be irrelevant at all, some have to be expanded and so on.
The problem with the present system (e.g. many different documents) is, that those are not dynamic at all. This can lead to the usage of 10 or more different schemes to complete one assignment for university.

Where is your user group interacting with your software?
At their desk, in libraries, maybe even in trains – wherever they learn. It could possibly also be used for exercise courses in universities.

When is the user group interacting with your software?
When they are learning, writing a paper (e.g. Bachelors-/Masters-Thesis) or writing an open-book-exam.

Why do your users need this software?
As pointed our earlier, the great amount of content demands for a structured course of action. Obviously the present solution does not match that requirement. Therefore it is necessary to implement a software-solution that is dynamic and features a clear presentation of the needed scheme. This reduces the cognitive load for the students so that they can focus and learn the important contents of their present case.

How do you want to solve the problem?
Since studying is not bound to the students own desks where they most probably have an Computer, but takes place in trains, libraries or even coffee-shops we aim at creating an app for mobile devices that either guides the student through the specific scheme with questions for every step or that provides a possibility to dynamically create full schemes based on selections of the user. The actual implementation depends on the needs and wished of the user group and has to be specified in the upcoming interview.

Reflection

Who did what?
We brainstormed all together to find a suitable subject with good access to the user group. The actual contact to a student that explained the problem was made by Tobias which is why he (i.e. me) writes this Blog post.
Anil creates the presentation and the project pitch.
Simon came up with the brilliant name and provided ideas for the possible solutions for the problem.

What have we learned?
Understanding the users problems is hard. Especially in a field (like law) which is quite new to us and where we do not have expertise.

What went well?
We found pretty fast a user group which we have good access to. Also this group came up with a good problem that seems to be very manageable by algorithms and digital systems.

What do we want to improve?
Due to other courses and projects it was very hard to find dates for meeting. Therefore we just managed to meet Saturday evening which is far away from ideal. We want to improve that and meet earlier so we are not in fear of getting in a hurry.

And maybe we want to improve our group-picture…