Book Discoverability and Physical Bookstores
This is a quarter-long assignment from HCDE 303 (Spring 2013) at the University of Washington. The class focused on project management, and the assignment was to create project management documents for a project addressing a semi-real problem (as I understand it) that Amazon is trying to solve. The background for this project is as follows:
We assume that customers often have difficulty determining their next read. We assume that customers don’t often think of Amazon as the go-to resource for discovering new content. And finally, we assume that brick-and-mortar bookstores presently afford greater opportunities for discoverability. Are these assumptions correct and if so, how can Amazon help customers discover their next read?
This was a group project, and my teammates were Rose Elizabeth Beede, Terrence Duenas, Soomin Chang, and Jared Boisseranc. The project involved creation of four major project management documents, and an oral presentation at the conclusion of the course (click here for slides from the presentation). The four documents were:
The project as a whole turned out reasonably well. The instructors were unhappy with the level of design detail (we chose not to focus on design), but the project management parts of the documents are solid. The schedule is probably still a little bit optimistic, despite several revisions. We learned:
Links to the appendices from the final report may no longer function at some point. Local copies of Appendix B and Appendix C are available. The documents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.