Categorie-archieven: Group Coaching

Introduction

Here you can read about the group process and my thoughts about that. You can see summaries of some sprints and retrospectives.

Changes since last feedback round

I did not get feedback on this chapter during the last round so I did not change anything in particular although the progress in the group/project continued.

Conclusion and reflection

In the beginning of the semester the group process could definitely be better, but we improved on this using the retrospectives and the group coaching where we talked about what went wrong and what everyone wanted. This way we found out that Frederique lost motivation because she could not work on her learning goals and because we now knew, we could improve that. These kinds of things made it so that at the end of the project we were all happy working on what we needed to do and could talk about things a lot better.

For me personally the themes of this last sprint were: making carousels, finishing the product whole and a lot of stress!

We really worked as a group to finish the most important features during this sprint and I took it upon me (with help from Scott) to put it all together and have it function well. This is partially why I was stressed, it was also because I took too much tasks upon me and had trouble finishing it all. This is why I learned Ebru and then also Frederique how to make blend shapes on clothing. I took me a bit before I did this, because I was scared to have it impact my learning goal but Ebru convinced me that it would be alright and later Lisette also confirmed this.

In the end I am really proud of the project and I am extremely happy that it is a complete and full experience and was happy to see this confirmed during the last testing Friday. We also really improved as a group and had a great workflow at the end of the semester and could really talk well together.

This was our last testing Friday, so all the feedback we got is for the transfer document, because after this the semester ends and we won’t be able to make changes to the project anymore.

We did make one change because Lisette recommended that which is resetting the blendshapes before the dress-up and making the clothing fit better, so that the product looks better for the customer on Monday. We did notice that all testers liked that the experience was complete. The framerate was bad, but we discovered the issue quickly and noted that for the transfer document. This was also the day where the teachers came in and I think they thought it was a good product, although they didn’t like that there were some bugs in there and we got feedback on that.

Here you can view our testplan and notes from this testing day:

This was a sprint where we worked from home, which made it harder to help each other and also harder to learn from other people. I also noticed that my teammates had trouble receiving help from teachers, which was not because the help was bad, but because everything had to be done via video calls.

We utilized our Discord a lot more and used topics in our channel for clarity. This is also the sprint where we started having git problems, so we couldn’t merge things properly. Scott and I planned because of this that we would rework the project from the ground up in the vacation which eventually wasn’t needed (luckily!). A new git repository did the trick this time.

We did focus well on the action points of the previous sprint and organized our Trello board better to include priorities for each tasks, so that everyone knew what had to be done first.

This was the retrospective where I led the conversation and that went pretty well. I was doing this, because I want to get more experience with it and to know how to do it. I sometimes had some trouble with what the next step would be but then I asked my team mates for help.

The biggest things that came out of this retrospective wee us wanting to finish the project well and make it polished, but we were also worried about some bugs that were on our minds and about the whole corona situation. You can read our tasks on the second page of the pdf below:

During this testing Friday we wanted to test a couple of things:

1. How long does it take for someone to know what they can do in the game.
2. Do we need an onboarding scene?
3. Do people feel inspired?
   • They did not, because the clothing was too static and didn’t fit the avatars well.
4. Does the text help the people during the experience.
   • A lot of people thought it was annoying to keep having to read text so we made a goal to fix this in the next sprint.

Here you can see the responses to our questionnaire:

During this sprint there were two big experiments, the first is trying out controllers instead of hand tracking. I have written separate articles on that. One and two. This article will focus on the second change and that is that I took on the role of solo programmer.

In the previous sprints Scott and I did all the programming work together and it felt a lot like we needed a third person. We felt that there was too much programming to do for two people. The teachers said that maybe Ebru and Frederique should learn programming too and can take some workload off of us. I was against this idea, and I do not mean this in a bad way, but I was thinking that it would only make our workload more. This was because they would need a lot of help from us and take a lot of time doing things we could do really quickly.

I heard from Ebru that she talked to another group and they actually only had one programmer. This got me thinking and I proposed that we would do the same. I would be the only programmer in our group for sprint 3 and we tried that out. I thought this because that would put a bit more pressure on that one person and that person wouldn’t need to divide the work. Also, I could then ask any questions I had to Scott instead of us both having trouble and needing a third person.

Reflection

We did this and it worked out great. I think this is one of the reasons that we had so much more work done this sprint. It also made me feel like I contributed way more than before and I could focus on it a lot better. This is definitely something we will take with us during the rest of the project.

During this coaching we talked with Lisette about our retrospective and our new action points. She also told us she wanted a more defined plan if we want to work from home. You can read more about this here.

We as a group have decided to start working from home almost exclusively. We understand the advantages of seeing each other in person, but the risks of the corona virus situation are too high for us right now. This is why we decided to make this decision.

We also made a couple agreements to ensure we will still keep the group spirit intact and keep each other up to date. An example would be scheduled stand-ups and stand-downs and having a structured Discord-server. These agreements and our complete proposal that we send to the teachers can be read in the document below:

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We had two big points we all agreed on during this third retrospective. One being that we all thought the sprint went by really fast and the other being that we all thought that our group process went a lot better with more communication and a clearer goal.

Our action points from the last sprint were the following:

1. In deze sprint gaan wij met een show-and-tell systeem werken hierdoor willen wij het proces verbeteren door meetbare producten neer te zetten. Dit gaan we controleren door te bespreken wat we op de dag en in de week willen afkrijgen.
   • We did do this, but in the last few days we did not focus on it nearly enough. That’s why we now, especially since we are working from home, will be putting more focus on it and writing everything down and checking it at the end of the day.
2. Tijdens deze sprint gaan we meer richten op onze leerdoelen. Dit doen wij door meer op onszelf te focussen. Dit controleren wij door vaker aan elkaar te vragen of je denkt dat je wel of niet aan je leerdoel werkt en of je je goed en gelukkig voelt binnen het project.
   • This was a point we made because people were losing motivation when they could not work on the things they wanted to learn. During this sprint we focussed on this by making the sprint planning in a way that everyone had at least one thing they really wanted to do and by asking at least every week whether everyone was still doing things they wanted. During the third retrospective everyone confirmed that this went well, but I did tell them my worries about my own learning goal being pushed further in time by other important things. They assured me by saying that my goal about blendshapes has a really high priority so I do not have to worry about that.
3. Voor aankomende sprint willen nog steeds rekening houden met andermans gezondheid, aardig tegen elkaar zijn en de kans geven om min en plus punten aan te kaarten maar daarbij wel een meer open communicatie hebben. Dit willen wij doen door ondersteuning te vragen tijdens de groupcoaching. We gaan dit controleren door binnen de groep te vragen of er wel of geen behoefte aan is tijdens het gehele project.
   • This went really well, you can read about it in the second point and in the first paragraph on this page.
4. Tijdens deze sprint gaan wij meer focussen op voor ons zelf kiezen en niet altijd maar ja zeggen op feedback. Dit controleren we door na een meeting met anderen hun feedback door te nemen en rustig onze eigen mening te vormen en daarna te overleggen wat wij van deze feedback vinden.
   • We did this a lot better than before, because after every piece of feedback and opinion from outside the group we sat down and discussed what we wanted to do with the feedback.

For this retrospective I chose the boat, because it focussed on multiple good and positive topics. We all took some time to write post-its and put them on the picture. Afterwards everyone described their post-its and we divided them into groups based on their topics. Lastly we each gave points to the groups and made action points from the four most important groups.

Reflection

I am very proud of our group process so far and that our communication has improved so much since the start of the project. I also asked if I can be the meeting leader during the next retrospective (talking through the steps for example), because I actually wanted to do that this time but someone else already did it and I did not want to disrupt.

You can see our action points and post-its below:

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This sprint review went really well, both with the company and with the teachers.

Everyone was really impressed with the progress we made. This was because we had a lot of new things and we focussed more on our end concept (so it looked a lot more how we envisioned it). I also really liked how the teachers were impressed by my work on the dressing up of the character.

We also discussed with Shoeby about the voting system, because this was too much time consuming and we would better focus on the core concept. We decided that you can take a screenshot of your character and the voting can then take place on Instagram, so Shoeby can take care of that themselves.

Reflection

I learned from this sprint review that when we as a group have a better idea how our product should be, we work harder and get a better end result.

You can read our notes here:

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As you can read here we had decided to temporarily remove hand tracking to speed up our development process.

Initially we had planned to only use controller input for one/two sprints, but we have since tested and we have decided that it is not only in our best interest but also for the end user, to continue to use controllers instead of hand tracking.

We asked people that have tested our product with hand tracking and with controllers whether they preferred one over the other and the majority of test participants said they preferred the controllers. You can also see that in the results of our questionnaire in this article.

Reflection

What I learned from this is that you should not always listen to one persons opinion (in this case the teachers saying we should keep hand tracking) and that you should always test, because we all thought that hand tracking would be the preference of the users but they said the opposite and that gave us the final push to continue with controllers. After we had clear test results the teachers also accepted our decision more, because we had visible proof instead of only our own opinions.

During this testing Friday we worked with a schedule where we asked people beforehand if they wanted to test. We also prepared a new questionnaire and made more structured notes. We prepared three measurable tests for this day. The first one being how quick someone figures out they can dress the character with clothes they grab from the world. The second one being how often someone switches the clothing on the character. And the last one being an A/B test where we showed the environment twice but the water had a different colour. We then let the participants choose and explain which version they liked better.

Because we had better goals and more thought-out questions we got a lot of answers we could work with. For example testing if people prefer hand tracking or controllers. We asked all people who tried hand tracking before if they liked that or the controllers better. This was very usable for us, because we still needed results from people who played whether we made the right decision to use controllers instead of hand tracking. You can read more about that here and here.

Some people tried to grab the clothing from the avatar and I think this is because we used to have that as a feature in our concept and I will implement that when I improve my dressing system.

Reflection

We got a lot of positive and useful feedback. People enjoyed the environment a lot and found it beautiful. We also learnt that the skybox is not yet cohesive enough with the rest of the environment. Everyone commented on the music and sound, which made us happy to see that that has such a big impact. I also really liked seeing people play with the character and dressing it up. It is fun to see people have fun with something you made :).

You can read the results of the questionnaire here:

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As you could read in these two articles: one and two we had some trouble in our group. During this coaching I did not feel like I could accept the current situation any longer and also after talking with Lisette who assured me that it would be discussed during this group coaching I decided I would put everything on the table myself (as no one else did during the conversation).

At first I said that I thought that the group needed to be pushed more. Normally I try to push a group I am in (as in trying to keep everyone working and motivated) but I did not do this yet this time, because I do not always want to be “the one in charge”. However I felt that the group needed this. I proposed it and they did not want it, because it felt too harsh for them. However Ebru did say that she would help Frederique personally more to keep working during the day.

The next things I asked about where the things from the articles I mentioned in the first paragraph. I asked Frederique what was wrong and she said that she did not know anymore and then Ebru asked what she meant with “bad open communication”. She told us that sometimes she does not want to say things back for example when I say I do not think something is possible she does not want to say that she thinks otherwise. I said that she should still say that and that I would be happy to be proven wrong. I also said that she told me she wanted to make a feature in a short time, but then she said “no, I only wanted to do research”. To this I asked her whether she could be more clear in her communication because then I wouldn’t have said that it wasn’t possible. Another thing was that she did not explain it well on Trello and gave the card a lot of hours, which was also why I said it wasn’t possible with all the work she still had to do as well.

The last thing we talked about is that Frederique spends a lot of hours (for example the entire afternoon) on her personal projects instead of school work. To this she said that she tries to work more hours after school to even it out. But Ebru then corrected her because in the example where she lost the whole afternoon she only worked an hour extra and that is not enough. We then made an agreement that she should not work on other things in school hours anymore and I hope that this will work out well.

Reflection

What I learned from this coaching is that I need to put things on the table if they are troubling me and that you need to set boundaries (like the thing I wrote in the last paragraph) to help some people work well. Also sometimes people communicate in a different way and you may not get the information you need which leads to miscommunication.

I hope that from now on our group will work better together.

During this sprint we had the problems in the group with Frederique, which you can read about here, here and here. And afterwards we had a discussion about how to divide the programming work and you can read about that here.

We also used to do a meeting after the lunch when working from home, because Lisette recommended that but I asked the group if we could skip that meeting. Because: 1. it made us skip the stand-down, because we did not have new things to discuss during the stand-down and 2. for me it became too interuptive and I was losing more than an hour each day to meetings and I had a hard time restarting after every meeting, so I was losing a lot of time. The group agreed with this and it worked well in the end.

As you could read in this article we had some troubles in our group with Frederique and we wanted to discuss that during this group coaching, because she asked us to wait for that.

We started this group coaching, but it was with a different teacher than we expected and thus Frederique did not want to tell us what was wrong anymore. We did again ask her if we did something wrong because we were still feeling bad. She reassured us again and then we tried to let it go, because we did not feel like it would get better by feeling bad and she also was late for this group coaching so we did not think we could help if we already tried it during the retrospective.

After this the group coaching went along as normal, so we talked about the concept and how everything else was going. This went well and there are no highlights.

Reflection

What I learned from this is the same as I described in this article.

We still wanted to discuss everything as a team and you can read this here.

Before we did this retrospective I had a talk with Scott and Ebru, because we had a feeling that there was something going on with Frederique, because we did not feel like she had enough motivation (arriving late, working on other things, etc).

Because of the above concerns we talked with Frederique and she said that there were some things going on that she did not want to discuss right now and she wanted to wait till we had group coaching. She did say that there were some things with open communication that she did not like. She did not want to elaborate on this but assured us that we did not do anything wrong. The three of us were concerned that she did not feel safe to express her feelings with us, but she said that that was not the case. One other thing that she said is that she felt like she could not work on her learning goals, so we made that a priority during the retrospective and made a goal about it.

We did do our normal retrospective and we talked about how we can get ourselves to work harder. For this we made a new system called show-and-tell where every morning we say what we want to achieve and every afternoon we show our achievements. We also want to focus more on saying no to feedback instead of doing everything what everyone else says.

Reflection

What I learned from this is that sometimes people do not have motivation and you can not help and in that case you need to let it go, because I had a hard time letting the above troubles go because we were having a bad time because we felt bad and we did not achieve as much as we wanted. Instead I should next time focus on myself and my own achievements and try to not feel bad because of one group member.

This story continues in this article.

You can see our retrospective in this document:

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We have (temporarily) decided to use controllers instead of hand tracking. Even though learning hand tracking is my (and also Scotts) learning goal, we do not think that it will help us develop faster at this moment.

1. The documentation we are using for Oculus is lacking (we can for example not find how to teleport (had to make that ourselves));
2. There were not enough tutorials;
3. If there are things available they were pre-made and paid;
4. Things that were supposed to work did not work;
5. Things we had to write ourselves would not work well enough (gesture recognition recognizing gestures that were not made);

Reflection

Even though we had it as a learning goal we still have enough learning goals left, so we decided to not use it for now, because we were developing way slower than we wanted. The teacher gave us feedback that they did not want us to stop using it because it was easier for first time users to use hand tracking so we promised that we would do it for this sprint and then look if we can use hand tracking again. We also planned to A/B test it with users and you can read about that here.

Today we had the sprint review of the second sprint. First we talked with the teachers and they gave us a lot of valuable ideas and they really thought along with us. After that we had the presentation for the company and that also went well.

There is only one thing that I need to discuss with my teammates after this meeting, which is the use of a different avatar. Shoeby told us during the meeting that they want us to use their own avatar (which is only available as a female version) but they did not give us a real reason for this other than they want it. I do not agree with this change and also in the theme of making our own decisions I have the following arguments:

1. My biggest learning goal, something I have been wanting to do for a long time, is blendshapes. When we use their model we will just use pre-set models with a few sizes.
2. There will be way less inclusivity, they only have a female model available and the model we are currently using is gender neutral. They also want us to only use female clothing if we do this.
3. They did not give a reason other than wanting it and we are supposed to make decisions in favour of our education and what we think is best (see arguments above).

The notes from both meetings can be found in the following document:

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On Friday at the end of the second sprint we had the second testing Friday. Unfortunately I was sick at home, so I could not be there when people were testing our prototype. I did help the group by making a questionnaire in the morning.

I also received some notes from Scott:

• Lighting – spotlight, playing with light
• Grab gesture for grabbing (instead of pinching)
• Everyone tries to wear the shirt themselves instead of putting it on the character
• Doing sound in the next sprint
• Remove collision from body

I also asked Ebru if she could summarize what they learned from watching the testers that day and she said that the testers found the environment relaxing and fascinating, but that it felt less like fashion compared to the previous prototype. Also the hand tracking still didn’t work as well as needed, so that is why we discussed later to remove hand tracking from the project. You can read about that here.

There were also a few people that commented that the environment looked like a Japanese garden, which is not bad, but it is not the Shoeby style so we will keep in mind to not go too much into that direction when further designing the world.

These are the results from our form:

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Today I had a presentation with Scott for our other group members. We did this because we noticed that they still had trouble working with Git and understanding it (what it is, how it works and why we use it).

I made a presentation beforehand which had most of the things written out in it and that is what I presented. I made the presentation so that they can reread it if they forget something. After presenting Scott gave a demo about cloning a git repository, making a new branch and making a merge request. We also answered a lot of questions and asked them repeatedly if everything was clear.

We really wanted to make sure that they comprehended everything better than before so that’s why we made it as extensive as possible and made it so that they have documentation about it.

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This group coaching was with Kees and Ebru joined online because she was sick.

We talked about the environment to help Ebru and we also talked about story telling for Frederique. Scott and I also tried to help by discussing ideas and I am glad that they received more feedback so they can continue working.

During this sprint we spent a lot of time on concepting and we also had a smaller group than at the start. This made it harder for me to get motivated. During individual coaching we talked about this.

After the individual coaching it went better because I tried to not focus on the concept too much and instead did my own learning goals. The other thing I had trouble with during this sprint was that Jules had to leave the group, because he was not allowed to continue the minor. This was hard for us and especially for me (and Scott) because we had envisioned to do the whole project with him because he is our friend. We also felt like this could make the project harder for us because we were missing someone.

Another thing was that Frederique was absent because she went to Fashion Week. Afterwards she got sick. Because of this and the paragraph above it felt like we had to do the whole sprint with only three people and I think that put more stress on us.

We focused a lot on the design of the environment during this sprint and you can read more about that here.

During this group coaching session we talked with Lisette about how the retrospective and the first sprint went. We discussed our new agreements and talked about the sprint review. She confirmed that we need to focus on figuring some things out like how the player will travel through the world and what do we want to have in our product at the end of the next sprint.

Our notes from this meeting:

We had the first retrospective and that went well. We used Miro and wrote down things we were proud about and things we were a bit worried about.

After we all wrote down things in silence we talked about what everyone meant with their post-its and then we divided them into groups based on their general topic. From this we discussed what a good learning topic could be for the next sprint and wrote them down. Everyone picked something they liked to watch over (for instance I picked the one about motivation, because I think that is an important part of group work).

Learning topics:

• We are going to remain the structure in the project by communicating better with each other. We will watch this by reminding each other that we should answer questions in group chats within a couple hours.
• We are going to remain the structure in the project by looking at Trello at the end of the day and checking if it needs to be updates. We are going to watch this by checking it in the stand-ups.
• We are going to keep being motivated to learn and help each other by recapping at the end of the week on two topics. 1. Something you are happy to have learned. 2. Someone that helped you and you are grateful for.
• If the classroom is too busy moving to another room.

Today we had our first sprint review. It consisted of a meeting with the client and a meeting with the teachers. First we had the meeting with the client and they were very enthusiastic and afterwards we had the meeting with the teachers and we got a lot of feedback from them.

Kees made notes during the meeting with the client, which you can read at the bottom of this article (first document is my translation of the notes, second is the original). The conclusion was that the client really liked it, but we did notice that they had some expectations that might not be possible like a giant world with all the clothing they have in it (this will consume too much time for us), so next meeting we will talk to them about it and explain what we can do.

We have already thought of a solution for the size of the world which also solves the need for teleportation (which we discovered while testing was not a good idea). This solution was an idea from the teachers in the second meeting, they proposed a hub-and-spoke system where we could divide the clothing types between different hubs and have one main hub where you dress and edit you character. Ebru has designed this and you can see her model here:

Another tip from the teachers was that we should refrain from using the terrain tool in Unity because it creates a lot of unnecessary polygons.

Another big thing the teachers noted is that it was confusing to dress an avatar that is only in first person and that we need to find a way to have the player view their avatar. I agree with them because we would have needed to make an extensive work around to make it work well in first person and being able to see yourself at all times.

We also made some notes of the teachers meeting (English version below image):

– You must be able to see the puppet, for example in a reflection or smaller in your hand.
– Do challenges instead of dressing up yourself
– Really see the doll instead of using yourself as a decoration because you want to be able to see everything
– How does it go when you pick up a piece of clothing?
– Don’t throw it on yourself but on Bob
– Really some standard sizes with as choice customizing
– Watch out that you can not make weird figures
– Polycount and terrain is very high def
– The scaling is very out of proportion
– It is difficult if you want to have everything in it and also interact with everything
– One way to categorize things
– Hub-spoke models
– You have to take them into an experience not make them work
– But you do have free choice in where to go and so on
– Important to have the clothing system in the next prototype as soon as possible.
– Movement should indeed be easier
– Space should not only be beautiful, but also functional
– A lot has been made in a short time, that is clever
– Grass needs to be fixed
– More all functions, show the concept in the prototype
– Literally walk around things and show what the boundaries are
– E.g. start balcony of crystal, nowhere else except when it brings you back to balcony or mini balcony
– Doing things like recognizing your goal in the distance and being able to go there
– Find your way back, breadcrumbs
– Fill the world, but make sure you recognize patterns
– Think carefully about how people will use your world. If I want this, how do we do it?
– Recognizable things
– Idea – concept – design – prototype – test – repeat
– Design is missing

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Today we had our first testing session with people from the class and a couple of people from outside the project. Before we started I asked some people I know if they wanted to test, so that we had more testers than only people from within the class.

As for preperation we wrote some things down that we wanted to know from our testers. These things were:

• What people felt when they looked around;
• How they felt as a person within the world;
• Whether they felt big or small in comparison to the world;

• Do the hand gestures react well based on what they want to achieve;
• Is it clear what happens based on what they do.

So, the main focus of this test were two things: whether the environment has a “fashion feel”. This is important because the client want the experience to feel like their brand (values). The second thing was: is handtracking easy to use (for our target group), this one is important because we want to use hand tracking since it is more natural and intuitive feeling, BUT if it does not work well it makes people even more frustrated.

From our testing goals we made the following questions:

• What is the feeling you get when you look around you?
• How do you feel within the world?
• Do you feel too small in comparison to the world?
• Do the hand gestures react well on what you want to do?
• Is it clear what happens based on what you do?
• Is the “fashion feel” clearly recognizable in the environment?
• What is your standard hand position? (To know how people hold their hands when doing nothing).

We let the people play the game and have them tell us things while playing if they wanted and noted that in a document. Afterwards we asked them all the questions noted above. You can read the document after the next paragraph.

In conclusion we got good answers to our questions. We learned that the world needs a lot more fine-tuning before it has the right feel and I am of the opinion that it will also help when we install lighting and particles in the environment the world will feel more cohesive and finished. We also learned that the hand tracking works, BUT the movement should not be done via hand tracking, because people kept moving without wanting it and we now know that the gestures are not precise enough to use for the character creation. This is also because the gesture detector sometimes recognizes gestures while a person is transitioning between gestures (or doing nothing) and this makes it that for instance the scaling of the character resets while the player did not want to do that.

We are now looking into AutoML for the character creation, because Lili gave us a class about it and there we learned that you can have the code recognize hand movements, which will be more precise and very useful for us.

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This was a normal group coaching where we discussed our concept and progress/process.

This was a normal group coaching where we discussed our concept and progress/process.

This is the first group coaching we had and it was with Lisette. We told her our concepts that we had so far and she gave us feedback about them. She told us about multiple concepts that they needed to be more special and out of the box. At the end of this group coaching session we decided to work more at school that week, because we needed to see each other in person to discuss the concepts better.