Please add your comments and suggestions on how we can improve the UCamps in the future.
Suggestions
I think the biggest key learning was that we should have the developers build their environment prior to the session, as Sakai seems to be very difficulty to build and that can take a lot of time. I would also suggest trying to pick programmer leads for each group, and explain to them how important it is to get all members of the group involved (and not to just get bogged down in figuring out a piece of functionality on their own, without explaining what they are up to). I think if each team had a projector and the team lead projected and explained what they were doing, that could help this out a lot. The team leads also need to know how to delegate work to different folks on the team, and then to bring it all back together and summarize what happened at the end. In some situations, it may be that the team lead should be primarily a facilitator, making sure everyone is productively working on something, or in others it may be best to have the team lead do most of the work themselves and just walk others through what s/he is doing on screen, ensuring everyone (at least mostly) understands what they are doing.
Finally, I would also recommend going through some of the design process with the programmers. Maybe we don't want to do design on the fly, but maybe have each designer give a little presentation on how the design was created, then have a discussion of the pluses and minuses of the design (both technically and from a design standpoint) with the programmers. I would also love to see a future project that involves Fluid components so that we can do a more effective contextual inquiry.
- Put together a short, concise overview presentation of the design(s) including personas, pain points which the designs are trying to solve, and what areas of Sakai the designs affect
- Spend less time in the larger group, more in smaller groups, including walking the group through the process used to create the designs
- Do a sprint on Friday instead of Monday
- Partner first half of uCamp with Intro to Sakai
- Add intro segment in uCamp on User Experience/User-Centered design (for folks who have no idea what it is...could be held from 8-9am)
- Find a way for the work done to be continued and eventually implemented in Sakai
- Allow people to propose work that they need to be done (if they will provide development resources, that makes it a more desirable potential project)