Starting off we learned about different ways of designing. We have mainly tried to focus on user-centered design during this process, but due to time constraints we have also sometimes acted as genius designers and tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the user. We learned that it is hard to stick to only one design approach and it is often best to have several in your design arsenal.
After learning about approaches it was time for us to start our own research with museums in mind. By doing state of the art analyses we evaluated current solutions and designs at museums, taking with us strong and weak points. We also turned to different kinds of qualitative research at the museums we visited (we decided to visit two in order to get a wider perspective) conducting interviews, observations and taking a lot of photos. By doing this we got a good picture of our target group, realising that their needs and wishes perhaps weren't what we thought. With a clearer picture of the museums and our target group we started brainstorming and coming up with ideas for the problem we decided to focus on: learning.
We did both structured and more un-structured types of brainstorming. For example we wrote down a bunch of ideas and concepts on post-its and stuck them all to a big paper, used the "Yes, and also..." method where we further developed each other's ideas as far as we could and also narrowed down personas and pain points to further the idea stage. Looking back at this perhaps we should have focused more on quantity instead of quality when doing our brainstorming and ideations in order to get even more ideas in movement.
When narrowing down our ideas to a concept we found many design principles in the book that we wanted to keep in mind. We wanted a really clean and simple design since the current solutions often were messy and hard to interact with, Fitts's Law came in good use as well as the Poka-Yoke Principle. We wanted it to be clear to the user what elements to interact with and we wanted to minimise or even remove mistakes as much as possible. Another problem we found in the current solutions was that not enough feedback was given to the user, we got really confused when trying to interact with screens and such because of the lack of feedback. We put much focus on doing this better than the current solutions, making usage more natural and painless.
While refining our concept and design we imagined different scenarios when the user might interact with our product. Our main three were: At the start of the visit, during the visit and at the end of the visit. Our product needed to do different things in the different scenarios, which then had sub-scenarios where other things had to happen and we focused on making solutions for as many as we could think of.
Another important factor to us was the input controls - we wanted it to be easy to interact with our product. We decided on a few traditional ways of input on a screen: text box for name, slider for age and buttons for everything else. We chose the really traditional input controls in order to not confuse our users. We don't want people to spend time wondering what to do, we want it to be clear. We did however also decide on a more non-traditional way of input: Presence. The interaction with all of the screens in our concept starts off with this input method, we believe it provides a real "coolness-factor" and it makes it clear to the user that this is a screen you can interact with.
When prototyping our design we did both low-fi and high-fi prototypes. The low-fi we did using paper and it really helped us to come together as a group and all get on the same page when it came to how we wanted things to look visually. Small things such as where to put buttons and what size things should be sometimes took more time than we though they would. We also used our low-fi prototype to get feedback from users by doing think alouds which gave us even more to work with when doing our high-fi prototype. Already having discussed so much about the look and feel of the design in the low-fi really helped when we did the high-fi prototype, saving us a lot of time. Giving our design a personality in this stage is something we found both important and fun! We have tried to have a consistent graphic profile, putting effort into making our design look good and have a real personality.
Finally, we have learned a lot about working as a group and how to work on a concept for a longer period of time. All in all we feel that we can take many of the lessons learned with us as we continue our education and eventually in our working life.
D5 - having fun and learning together.
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