Sprint 3: Insights and Hot Takes
Written by the 2023 99P Labs x CMU MHCI Capstone Team
Edited by 99P Labs
The 99P Labs x CMU MHCI Capstone Team is part of the Master of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Catch up on Sprint 2 here!
Towards the end of Sprint 2, our team embarked on an overnight trip to our client at 99P Labs in Columbus, Ohio. While we were there, we learned about the different projects our clients were currently working on, shared physical research artifacts, and looked into our next steps together. The following week, we developed a new hypothesis using takeaways from our visit and created pretotypes to understand reactions from Gen Z. We also spent time together synthesizing data from our intercept interviews and used insights from those to inform our ‘hot takes’ to decide on more specific directions to pursue.
Our Client Visit
We met up with our clients at the 99P Labs office in the morning. After a quick tour of the office, we dived straight into two presentations from our clients about topics we expressed interest in. Throughout the presentations, we wrote down things that stood out to us on pink, blue, and green Post-Its for our Rose, Bud, Thorn activity. After lunch, we did a quick review of all the work we’ve done since our last meeting with the client and dove into an affinity activity that allowed us to identify areas of opportunity in a collaborative setting.
For the activity, we asked our clients to take notes about things from our research process that stood out to them in the same Rose, Bud, Thorn format. We then came together and went through all our notes, identifying prominent themes and expanding upon topics of interest. Through our discussions, our team and our client were able to align on the current problem space, and our client could share the areas that would be interesting to explore further.
Client Visit Takeaways
Based on our client visit, each member of our team came up with 2 takeaways from our discussions and activity. Using these takeaways, we found specific groupings in the reasons why people choose to not learn or perform activities in commute. With this in mind, we developed a new hypothesis to guide our efforts:
People want to get stuff done and learn in their cars, but are limited by a multitude of constraints.
Pretotypes
This hypothesis allowed us to focus our efforts on developing a solution that would remove barriers and enable people to use their travel time more efficiently. We began testing out this hypothesis through pretotypes that addressed each of the following constraints.
- Context
- External Stimuli
- Duration
- Seating
- Motion Sickness
We chose to use pretotypes to obtain data that relates to how people would respond to having solutions that remove the barriers they have while on the move. We gathered feedback from student participants who commute focusing on these scenarios:
- What do you typically do in a car?
- What constraints do the vehicle environment pose for you?
- If these constraints were removed, what would you do?
Pretotype Insights
After having 10 participants across all of our pretotypes, we came together and extracted common themes along the constraints. We learned that:
- Seating preferences depend on who you’re with and how much control you want over sensory stimuli.
- Many people who have motion sickness have techniques to mitigate it
- People wanted to be able to manipulate the interface to engage with the external environment.
- It is important to make the in-vehicle UI customizable for the person and their content preferences while offering something that their phone doesn’t.
- Engaging, fun activities are perceived as shorter in duration and we can use this depending on how we want people to perceive time.
Intercept Interviews
As we obtained insights from our pretotype testing, our team brought together interpretation notes from the intercept interviews we conducted in the past sprints and performed synthesis along with our faculty. With nearly 20 intercept interviews done, we were able to reveal themes about the behaviors of Gen Z while on the move.
This synthesis led to numerous insights into how young people make use of their travel time, including the concept of an interest threshold that our design would need to surpass to capture a person’s attention in-vehicle and make learning a fun and engaging experience.
Other important insights include:
- People tend to engage in low-effort activities on short trips. The environment is often inhospitable to more demanding tasks.
- One’s capacity for curiosity is largely influenced by their mental state, while the ability to satisfy that curiosity depends on the amount of free time available.
- People get acclimated to their routine surroundings, and only notice when something changes.
- The finite nature of human attention means that immediate concerns, such as safety or upcoming presentations, often take priority over other considerations.
Hot Takes
Another highlight from this sprint was a discussion our team had with Francine Gemperle, whose research methods had informed part of our approach. Two points that stood out from this conversation were the fact that we should clarify what informal learning means to us, and a suggestion for us to come up with ‘hot takes’ on where to explore next as a team to help us dive deeper into specific areas.
Our discussions about defining informal learning for our design led to the development of the following concept model which combines our perception of the different forms of learning and research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Our team also came together and produced hot takes for our research directions, where we decided that we should look further into how we can make use of the predicted omnipresence of IoT technology in the future, along with V2X technology to craft an educational experience. We did a quick round of Crazy 8’s where we each came up with specific applications of this ‘hot take’ that we will conduct more research into in the coming weeks.
Next Steps
Alongside our main research activities, we have also continued to interview SMEs and visit automotive dealerships to gain insights into the latest technologies and trends. Most recently, we visited Porsche, Tesla, and Carvana. Our clients brought up that the latter two companies have tech-focused customers, so we went to learn how they were using technology to enhance the customer experience.
After all the research our team has conducted, it was great to come together as a team to understand the data we collected. We plan to continue to do that by synthesizing our SME interviews, testing our ‘hot take’, interviewing more stakeholders, and continuing to push our concept models. There is still a lot to explore, but we are excited to keep finding ways to revolutionize how people learn while on a journey.
The work and knowledge gained from this project are only intended to be applicable to the company and context involved and there is no suggestion or indication that it may be useful or applicable to others. This project was conducted for educational purposes and is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge.
