{"id":6518,"date":"2011-05-11T04:12:17","date_gmt":"2011-05-11T11:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/5.1053"},"modified":"2011-05-11T04:12:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-11T11:12:17","slug":"student-outreach-franco-papeschi-web-foundation-visits-listens-mentors-ashesi-hci-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/labs\/2011\/05\/student-outreach-franco-papeschi-web-foundation-visits-listens-mentors-ashesi-hci-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Student Outreach: Franco Papeschi (Web Foundation) \u2014 Visits, Listens & Mentors ~ Ashesi HCI students"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ashesi<\/a><\/p>\n

A guest post by, Franco Papeschi<\/a>… <\/em><\/p>\n

As part of my job at the Web Foundation<\/a> – I am quite often working in Accra (Ghana) – helping with the creation of a solid community of entrepreneurs, developers, designers passionate about mobile as part of Mobile Web Ghana<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For this reason, I couldn\u2019t be happier when I\u2019ve been asked by the guys at Mozilla Labs to be one of the mentors for the HCI course at the Ashesi University College<\/a>, taught by Dr Astrid Twenebowa Larssen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Ashesi Project<\/h2>\n

Like all other cases of present student outreach projects & collaborations<\/a>, the Ashesi HCI class is hands-on working on various project topics<\/a> as proposed by Mozilla Labs. <\/p>\n

From research, to concept and design, passing through the Peak of Personas, the Brainstorming River, and the Wireframes Valley. A journey. <\/p>\n

I joined them when they where in the middle of the creation of personas and scenarios, and they were almost ready to face one of the most exciting parts of design: the concept development. Personally, I have very strong opinion on personas: I think they are one of the most difficult part of being a User Experience professional, so I was really interested in seeing their interim results. But \u2013 before that \u2013 I couldn\u2019t resist to try and share what I learnt in 2 years of pure concept development (that was most of my job in my previous life at Vodafone Group).<\/p>\n

The Talk – ‘Slow Elevators: Design Is Not Just Incremental’<\/h2>\n

Reduced version of a talk that I\u2019m putting together, I\u2019ve tried to present the students with a perspective on how a thorough research can lead to something more than incremental improvements in a service. <\/p>\n

It can \u2013 in fact \u2013 be used for starting from scratch with new services, elaborating what we see, hear and understand from our dialogues with \u2018the users\u2019. As a design-oriented researcher, please do not always take findings at face value. And ask yourself why these are the perceived problems\u2026<\/p>\n

Faster horses & slow elevators: where does innovation come from?<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve used a very common example to make my point. It\u2019s a story about slow elevators, to illustrate how the key to solving a problem is often defining the problem correctly in the first place. <\/p>\n

Here’s one version of the story<\/a> from the 37Signals blog.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also tried to give some practical advice to brainstormers, to make sure they had the right tools to find their way in this journey. I promise a screencast of the talk soon.<\/p>\n

\"Franco

Franco delivering his talk<\/p><\/div>\n

Feedback on Talk<\/h2>\n

It was nice to hear some positive feedback:<\/p>\n