It’s been a while since I last wrote here. I simply have forgotten the whole thing!At the moment we are working with the vuosikello-project and the first deadline is behind us. We managed to get something done even though it seemed it may be impossible. Ulla was a very good team manager and we did all we could. The biggest problem seems to be lack of information and I’m sure everyone has tried their best but we’ll see how it goes. I’m the communications manager of the project and I’ve written a plan for communication but I’m sure how well it works. I did have to make some changes to my original plan because I turbed out be a bit unefficient. You can’t know everything beforehand..

Yeah, I have to say something about the habbo hotel experience. I was kind excited about trying out habbo hotel but I didn’t really find it useful because it was somewhat confusing and we didn’t really get much done. It would have been much more efficient to just talk face to face or send an e-mail. Maybe it could work better next time but I don’t know. It was fun, no doubt about that but that’s all it was. Hope I don’t sound too negative!=) But I had never used habbo hotel before and now I have so I know now how it works. That’s good. =)

It is almost Christmas and and I guess it is time to write here some thoughts about the autumn term. I have to admit that I underestimated the amount of work I had to do this term. Everything would have been ok but then I decided to take a job at Stockmann and I didn’t realize it would take so much of my time. On Tuesday I really felt like I couldn’t do anything anymore and I just wanted to go to sleep!Now I feel relieved because I actually have done pretty much everything I needed to and Chritmas Eve is only a couple of days away.

In this course I could have worked harder and I can always say that I was too busy but the truth is that at times I was just lazy. I can’t really say that I’m completely happy with my performance I intend to do better in the spring. I feel like I did everythingI had to but I didn’t really put enough effort into doing things. I kind of took the easy way out. All the projects and exercises were interesting, that was not the problem, and I don’t really know what the problem was.  I didn’t trust in my ability to  do thing well enough and I let the others make the decisions.  It’s weird because I really was excited about this course and I feel like I didn’t make the most of it.

The last project on Facebook felt easier than the others because the subject is familiar and I guess the unfamiliarity of some things and not knowing how to do things kind of scared me a bit and I should have been more eager to find information and get to know these things. That’s something I have to work on.  And maybe because I feel like most of the other people on the course know much more about these things than I do I prefered to stay in the background.

But it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I do like my hometeam and I don’t have any complaints. And I didn’t have any problems with the teachers or anyone else. The only problem was my attitude. =)

Our home team did the instructions on how to get a degree out from the English department. I think our team work was good this time and I was happy that I was more active with this task than with the persona. I’m pretty hapy with our use case but I noticed that there were some unnecessary comments in the final version we sent to eveyone. Something like ´bileet´ and what ever..Maybe we could delete those before Friday. =) It was somewhat difficult to do the instructions because we weren’t sure how things actually go!The English department webpages were a bit confusing and I’m not sure if all the facts in our instructions are correct. I hope that our review group knows and corrects the mistakes. =)

I’m a bit late with this persona thing but here goes. Our persona was Torsti and he was the only male persona in the group. I have to say that the results of my own interview are not that visible in Torsti. He is more a result of Teemu’s and Petri’s interviews. It was logical to do it this way because the boys had quite similar results. We did add some characteristics to Torsti based on my interview as well and, of course, my results were not completely different.

It was interesting that our persona was so different from the others and that the other groups had very similar personas. The person I interviewed was very similar with the personas of the other groups. Our group just decided to go the other way because Teemu and Petri had such similar results.

I think all the presentations were very good and interesting. I’m not that happy with my own performance because I was not very actively involded in doing our persona. The boys did most of the work. I guess it was natural since their results played a bigger role in our persona than mine.

It became clear that gender was an important factor because the results showed that women act in a certain way when they are using technical equipment. Women seem to let men do everything and are happy with being low involvement users. Women are more active in using technical equipment at work than at home. Age is also an important factor because older people are not usually that willing to use complex tehcnical machines. Our Torsti was a good example of this.

I actually did the first exercise a long time ago but I never wrote about it here so I had to do it again. So the task was to try finding a phone number for`kuluttajaneuvonta` on the www.ouka.fi web pages and finding out where Mäkelininkatu 39 is in Oulu and how easy it is to find.

I found the number for `kuluttajaneuvonta` quite easily. I just went to `palveluhakemisto` and found a link to `kuluttajaneuvonta web pages. I found two phone numbers and the address.  No problems with this exercise.

Then the second task. I clicked `opaskartta`on the ouka webpages and typed in the address and there it was. Very easy!But when I tried to find Makelininkatu 39 I run into some problems. I changed the language of the page to English and tried again. This time I found the address right away. Wasn’t that difficult. =)

I’ve noticed that it is quite hard to write here as often as i probably should since I don’t have a computer at home. I only have lectures a couple times a week so I don’t really have to come to the University that often either..I’ve done the interview and we’ve started to create the persona with Teemu and Petri. So far everything is going ok..I still haven’t written that tennisball thing so I should do that as soon as possible.

Finally I feel like I’m getting something done.  We  have the questions for our low-involvement interviews and now I just need to find someone to interview.  Reetta promised I could interview her mother if I can’t find anyone else so that’s good. I’ve also written my part of the wiki article I talked about last time so I can really concentrate on the interview. Oh yes, I should also do the homework thing about golfballs or tennisballs. I can’t seem to find the instructions anywhere. I guess I’ll have to ask someone.

I have so much to do and it seems I can’t get anything done!I should start writing here more often..should,could,would..argh…I guess I haven’t even mentioned yet that this blog is my learning journal for TC. All the lectures have been very interesting and all the articles and summaries are probably going to be easy to write. I just have arrange time for that. My plan is to write all the stuff I need to write tomorrow so we’ll see how it goes. I have to do the lecture summary and write something about the usability of wiki. The summary part should be fairly simple but the article..well,I’ll do my best!

I feel I don’t have ebough time(or energy) to write anything here but I guess I have to stop being so lazy and simply start writing. All the TC lessons have been quite interesting and I don’t really know why it is so difficult for me to write anything here. I’ve never had a blog before and maybe that’s the why this feels a bit odd.