Special Topics     Designing Mobile Services

05.499 & o5.899    Spring 2013

Location:     SCR (300 South Craig Street), Room 103

Time:     Tu and Th from 3:30pm to 4:50pm

Instructor:    Jim Morris

Office:    6017 Gates Hillman Center

Phone:    412 609-5000

Email:    james.morris@cmu.edu (I read email whenever I’m awake.)

Skype: jhm15217

Office hours:    by appointment

Coach:    John Zimmerman

Office:    NSH 2504F

Phone:    412-608-8181 (mobile … feel free to call or text me if you need me in a hurry)

Email:    johnz@cs.cmu.edu

IM (AIM):    atemegabites

Office hours:    by appointment (feel free to stop by ... or feel free to call and then stop by)

Coach:    Eric Cooper

Office:    GH 4109

Phone:    412 370 5825

Email:    ecc@cmu.edu

IM (AIM):   

Office hours:    by appointment

Overview

Over the last several years the software industry has reframed traditional products as services. The arrival of smart phones has opened a new domain for location-based, just in time, context aware, and highly social applications to emerge. Arriving with these new smart phones are mobile application distribution centers like the iTunes App Store and the Android Marketplace, which further reduce the amount of effort needed to create and distribute a successful software application. Today many of the resources needed by tech startups such as servers, electronic storefronts, analytics, and financial transactions can be purchased at very low cost as a service. This represents an exciting new frontier for mobile service startups. The barriers to entry in the mobile application market are so low that people can literally run a startup on the weekends with some friends. But how can you create a successful startup that makes service applications that can sell for $.99, that standouts against the constant explosion of new products and services, and that gains a foothold while moving towards profitability?

Objectives

In this class students will design a mobile service. Working in interdisciplinary teams of approximately five, students will work to imagine and communicate a mobile service that is desirable for a target set of users, fills a gap within the current competitive landscape, is technical feasible, and is financial viable. The course intends to develop three things:

o Attitudes

o Create financially viable services.

o Adopt the improv approach to teamwork.

o Be an active searcher and learner.

o Be a Lean Startup.

o Alternate between exploration and focus.

o Skills

o Presentations

o Value analysis

o Data gathering

o Design

o Business cases

o Video Sketches

o Understanding

o Services

o Mobility

Structure

This is a studio/seminar class with time devoted to lecture, discussion, practice activities, design work sessions, and criticism of student work. The class will follow a design process consisting of five phases:

§ Orientation: Students will describe the current state of the world in terms of politics, economy, society, and technology (PEST) to find product opportunity gaps—products and services that might improve the world.

§ Generation: Teams will use various design methods to ideate many possible services that could fill this gap

§ Analysis: Teams will investigate their possibilities from the perspective of desirability, technical feasibility, and financial viability and reduce the choices.

§ Pitch: Teams will produce a video sketch demonstrating the intended user experience of their mobile service.

§ Refinement: Teams will create a first, minimal implementation of the service intended to further test the market.

Each phase ends with a presentation and report that are specified in the links above.

Teams

This is a project class where students will work in a single team. Based on the various skill sets within the class, the instructors will generate teams of approximately 5 students.

Each team has a $100 budget to spend on things like Mechanical Turk, Google Ads, food, etc. Give me the receipts, and I’ll reimburse you and get reimbursement from my University discretionary account.

Following each design phase, team members will assess their teammates on the following criteria.

§ Group Participation: Attends meeting regularly and on time

§ Time Management: Accepts fair share of work and reliably completes it by the required time

§ Team Culture: Positive attitude, encourages and motivates team, supports team decisions, reach consensus, resolves conflicts

§ Technical/ Creative/Adaptive: Creates and develops materials on own, originates new ideas displays a wide range of skills, accepts change easily

§ Communication Skills: Effective in discussions, good listener, capable presenter, proficient at representing and documenting work

Peer evaluation can influence an individual student’s grade by up to 10% (-5% to +5%)

Reading

Many readings are in Business Model Generation which you should purchase ($20 from Amazon).

Other readings can be found in the Dropbox folder and the web. I’m working on getting a CoursePack from coursepacks.com; if it’s not too expensive I may ask you to buy it—I’m stretching the Fair Use doctrine by making things available directly.

You are encouraged to be a self-directed learner and use every source of help you can—the web, recommended readings, references in the recommended readings, previous student projects (DMS 2011 and DMS 2012), even other students and faculty. Don’t limit yourself to the suggested readings; find new ones. You must acknowledge and document all your sources; part of the grade for an assignment depends upon use of good sources. Pictures and other things you copy from the web should include the source. This absolves you of any charges of cheating and allows others to dig deeper into your ideas. (If we ever think you are doing too much mindless copying, we’ll say so.)

There are more readings to cover than we would expect any individual student to complete. Each task is followed by a list of resources, roughly in the order we value them. For required readings, marked by *, we will randomly choose students in each class to explain key points. For other readings the team can divide the work and have one person read each item and explain it if/when the need arises during the design process.

Graduate Credit

Students taking the 899 version of this class will be expected to play a leadership role in teams, especially in communicating the readings.

Rules of the road

· So that others may benefit from their work, all students must sign the following statement (or a negotiated version): “I grant Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute the non-exclusive right to use all the materials I submit for the course Design of Mobile Services for the purposes of instruction in other versions of the course.”

· Although the title of the class says “mobile services,” teams will be free to create any innovation if they see it as the best opportunity. It doesn’t have to be mobile or be a service.

· No student may record or tape any classroom activity without the express written consent of the instructors. If a student believes that he/she is disabled and needs to record or tape classroom activities, he/she should contact the Office of Disability Resources to request an appropriate accommodation.

· Students are expected to attend class, arrive on time, participate on a team, and discuss whatever they read. In addition, students are expected to offer criticism of their classmates’ work that helps the team improve their design. If students need to miss a class, they should email the instructors ahead of time, and they should be sure to inform their teammates they will not be attending.

· We encourage students might to attend the SXSW conference in Austin, TX during the spring break and discuss their ideas with people there. But we have scheduled student presentations for the Thursday before the conference begins, so leaving early is not a good idea. There are flights to Austin leaving at 18:35 Thursday, and we may offer a group limo leaving from Craig St. that day.

Grading Weights

Orientation presentation 10%

Generative presentation and report 15%

Analysis presentation and report 20%

Video sketch 20%

Refinement presentation and report   20%

Project’s Promise 10%

Class Participation  5%

New: Since mastery of certain concepts, e.g. value diagrams, will grow throughout the semester, I may go back raise low grades when something is demonstrated in a later phase.

Class Participation includes coming to class on time and with a positive attitude, participating in discussions of readings, presenting material that you have read and synthesized for the class (899 version of the class only), and most importantly a willingness to offer criticism of the work of other teams during the class crits including problems, suggested solutions to problems, and kudos for exceptionally good work.

Schedule

The course schedule will be maintained as this Google Calendar, DMS, and all other documents, including turned-in reports will be on a Dropbox™ folder, DMS. Readings for the week will be put in the Sunday item and can be accessed via links found in the calendar item descriptions. Select the url and right click it to find a menu item that opens the reading in your browser. Also, after each lecture, any ppt that was used will appear in the calendar entry for that lecture.