Intro

As Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot just by watching. Watching how people do things is a great way to learn their goals and values, and come up with design insight. We call this needfinding. This assignment helps you train your eyes and ears to come up with design ideas. Your goal is to uncover user needs, breakdowns, clever hacks, and opportunities for improvement.

Assignment

You are observing an activity, or set of activities, for the purpose of designing one or more improvements. You don’t need to restrict your observation to people using computers and the Web. If you’re designing for an activity that people don’t currently use computers for–or where non-digital tools have benefits–then observe people doing the task as they do it now. Observing the strengths and weaknesses of analog tools can inspire ideas for the digital world. Where people are using software, remember to observe and interview people in situ — using their computer, their software, in their environment, doing their activities. Context matters. If you have mobility limitations, perform your observations and interviews over email, phone, Skype, and/or video chat. If for whatever reason you’re interested in activities that are tough to observe — maybe because they’re infrequent — you can augment your interviews with diary studies. Make a list of types of people you might interview and situations you might observe to come up with design insights. Think about different types of everyday users, marginalized users, and extreme users. Also think about other stakeholders in the ecosystem. Think about the characteristics of these users. For example, remember the IDEO design team that was asked to redesign the grocery shopping cart. Their interviewees included not just everyday users, but also extreme users like professional shoppers and other stakeholders like store managers. Often, lead users or extreme users have come up with better solutions and creative tricks than designers. Interviewing and observing marginalized users not only helps us create more inclusive designs, it also often highlights issues that everyone has to varying degrees.

Pick an everyday activity of your choice

Choose an activity that is easy to observe, has at least one clear goal associated with it, and involves multiple actions. For example, this activity could be driving, walking to class, cooking a meal, playing a sport, exercising, or a set of activities at work. 

Consider the following:

• What is the goal of the activity?
• Who is taking part in those activities?
• What are the important events, or actions that are taking place to accomplish the goal? (e.g. walking, talking, sitting, watching, carrying, throwing, etc).
• What are the microevents? (clicking a button, checking the speedometer)
• Who is taking part in each individual activity? What are the roles? (e.g., driver, passenger; student, librarian)
• What activities are people doing vs computers?
• What tools are being used? (books, computers, phones, cars, sensors, etc)
• What kinds of tools could be used more effectively?

Observe three people carrying out the specified activity. One of the people can be yourself.

Choose people who are not similar to yourself in some way (for example, they are studying different discipline, working a different type of job, have a different family situation). Your goal is to observe the successes, breakdowns, and latent opportunities that occur during the activity. Observe how computers are currently used to carry out the activity, how they are NOT used, and how they could be used to support your chosen activity. 

During the observation, in addition to taking notes, use digital photographs or sketches to document activities, but do not use a video camera. This is because your choice of moments to capture with a photograph or sketch is what is important, as it shows specific successes and breakdowns. Be sure to get permission first if you are going to take a picture?

It should take you approximately two hours total to make all three observations and document effectively – if you have planned carefully. It will take longer if you haven’t!

Remember, these photos and sketches are meant to document your actual observations:

• Caption your photo or sketch to explain what it is you have observed. A photo or sketch of someone at a computer or writing on a pad of paper is not sufficient to explain your point to the instructor. Make sure you provide an explanation of what’s happening.
• Using stock photos/art is plagiarism and is unacceptable.
• Irrelevant images or sketches that do not relate to the task at hand are no better than not including one at all – make sure it makes sense to your instructor!

Identify opportunities for improvement. Brainstorm a list of specific opportunities for design innovation that would enable computers to better support the activity you observed. You don’t have to invent the next iPhone! The opportunities could be small improvements or enhancements to existing technologies.

Brainstorming is a group activity and should be fun! You are free to brainstorm with anyone around you to generate as many interesting ideas as possible. All ideas are good ones at this stage, and you should generate at least 15 of them: go for volume. You are not looking for solutions yet: focus on user needs and goals only.

An example of a potential improvement might be “Sometimes, when Scott takes the train home, there is no room for his bike and he has to wait for the next one. Scott needs a way to plan what train to take based on how much room is available in the bike car”.

It is helpful to use to phrases “needs a way to” or “needs to be able to” as you list your potential opportunities.

What’s this for?

A UX agency perspective by Mike Davison, Community TA and UX Project Manager:

Needfinding is probably the most important part of any UX Designer’s arsenal. Without it, your design team could spend months designing a solution that completely misses the point. You will be surprised at how much you can learn, especially when you vary the audience. Take the smartphone. In all likelihood, you will have seen an elderly person press the screen harder and more slowly when it does not respond as they had expected. Needfinding research has suggested that this relates to 50s, 60s and 70s technology – the technology this age group are familiar with…this technology often does yield a different result if you press harder. Why is this useful? Well perhaps we could develop interfaces that took into account the pressure the user applies, and not just where they apply it? How could we make the interface itself easier for the elderly user? Needfinding is a very powerful way to generate ideas.

Submit

• Build the submission file using MS Word.
• Begin by describing the activity.
• A captioned photograph or sketch from each person you observed. The photo and caption should capture a particularly interesting moment/breakdown/work-around from the observation. (You should have a total of 3 photos with corresponding captions for each).
• A list of needs/goals/tasks inspired by what you observed (at least 15). 
• Upload you completed work (in a single, MS Word, file unzipped) to Blackboard in the appropriate spot under assignments.

Example student submissions from the past are attached!

Directions:-

• Open a WORD 2016 file and save it as Lastname_Firstname_Chapter2_Project. Note the Lastname and Firstname is your Lastname and your Firstname.
• Go to the browser of your choice to access the following website. https://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/what-is-big-data-.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

  Using the word document created above, answer the following  questions below in one / two sentences. You may copy/paste from the website.

• Q1)I n a way, big data is exactly what it sounds like ___________________ 
• Q2)You’re producing data every time you do anything _________________________ and mine for useful information.
• Q3) What are data centers?
• Q4) How is analyzing Big Data helpful to Intelligence agencies?
• Q5) Is Big Data friend or foe? What are your thoughts?
• Save and upload the word document.

 Assignment 5: Technical Term Paper
Due Week 10 and worth 150 points

The Technical Term Paper will include the detailed response to the network design request. The document will be submitted in MS Word and will be between 10-15 pages with graphics embedded within the document.

Background

You are a small network design company called Wide-IP that is looking for that big break. As the CTO of the Wide-IP company, you recently made a persuasive presentation of your company’s approach to designing networks at a large industry event. The CEO of Fiction Corporation, a large retail chain, was impressed by your presentation. It looks like you’ve finally got your break! You have a small team of 10 technically proficient staffers with a strong background in project management, networking, and internetworking skills that include PMP, Network+, CCNP, and CISSP credentials.

You have been selected by Fiction Corporation to develop a network design document and plan without an RFP.

Overview

Fiction Corporation, a large national retail chain of 10,000 employees and 500 retail outlets, is migrating its one primary data center operation to a new headquarters building several miles away. The company wishes to upgrade its network and correct any security flaws in its infrastructure as part of this move. The Fiction CEO has informed you that the capital budget for this migration cannot exceed $500,000 and must not interrupt business operations. What follows is a brief background that will serve as your foundation in developing the network design.

The data in the center supports remote retail locations, an off-site 100 seat call center and 3 remote warehousing operations 24 hours a day with annual uptime at 99.9%. Any significant downtime to its production systems would impact Fiction Corporation’s operations and profitability. From the data processing viewpoint, the move includes 2 large UPS, 4 RS/6000 AIX application servers, 10 virtualized servers and 20 PC servers.

The network consists of approximately 500 remote location retail stores connected via frame relay (with ISDN backup) to 10 routers at the data center running a common LAN shared by the entire organization. The retail operations also run WLANs that are on its own subnet. You will have a T1 link and ISDN as a primary backup. Network managers also need to monitor the status of remote systems. The SNMP management system must be able to detect and report failure of the remote system or its communications link and the status of individual applications.

The company wishes a seamless migration that minimizes impact to its customers and employees. Any gaps in this background will require you to make sound technical and persuasive assumptions that satisfy the customer’s goals that are within the budget guidelines.

You were selected in part due to your detailed analysis and agreement to an implementation cost that will not exceed $500,000. Your network migration plan will be in phases with noted milestones. Key to the success of this plan is the availability of a T1 link between the remote sites to support remote bridging and development of configurations for all the remote routers.

Include the following in your assignment:
1. Title page
2. Table of contents
3. Executive summary
4. Project goal
5. Project scope
6. Design requirements:

a. Business goals
b. Technical goals
c. User communities and data stores
d. Network applications

7. Current state of the network
8. Logical design
9. Physical design
10. Results of network design testing11. Discuss the availability of a T1 link.
11. Implementation plan with a project schedule
12. Project budget with a return on investment calculation
13. Design document appendix

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Design a systematic network architecture plan in accordance with network design steps.
• Summarize among scalability, availability, performance security, manageability, usability, adaptability, and affordability as they relate to internetworking product selection.
• Design a network topology to include hierarchy, redundancy, modularity, and security.
• Create a network security plan inclusive of identifying and analyzing network assets, security risks, security requirements, and security policy.
• Develop network management strategies to include resource monitoring and data collection and interpretation.
• Describe processes that address performance, faulty, configuration, security, and accounting management.
• Compare and contrast the selection of technologies and devices for campus and enterprise networks that include remote access networks, WANs, service providers, end user remote access devices, central site remote access devices, VPN concentrators, and routers.
• Develop network design testing procedures through services, tools, and testing scripts.
• Describe optimal network design for critical business applications to include effective use of bandwidth and satisfying QoS requirements.
• Develop a comprehensive network design document.
• Use technology and information resources to research issues in network architecture and analysis.
• Write clearly and concisely about network architecture and analysis using proper writing mechanics and technical style conventions.

Subject : Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning  

The requirement is to write an essay that addresses the following items:

• Conduct research to determine three types of computer crime. Please provide a detailed description for all crimes, and share an example of where an organization was impacted by each of the types.

• Elaborate on how the impact of computer crime is quantified. Please share at least two examples.

• Include at least four (4) reputable sources. 

• Your final paper should be 1,500 words (minimum), and written in APA Style (do not forget about plagiarism)

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