Sprint 5: OH! We’re not in PA anymore!

Written by the MHCI x 99P Labs Capstone Team
Edited by 99P Labs

The MHCI x 99P Labs Capstone Team is part of the Master of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Catch up on the team’s Sprint 4 here!

On Friday March 25th, our team went on a 1-day trip to meet our client sponsors at 99P Labs Office in Columbus, Ohio. We shared physical research artifacts in-person, pilot tested a speculative design activity, and connected with additional stakeholders from the organization. In the following week, our team created a conceptual prototype to test our assumptions revolving around users’ needs. We also successfully finished a week-long diary study and spent time together as a team sifting through and synthesizing all our research data.

Trip to Meet the Clients

We took a group photo with our clients, Erin and Joan, in front of the 99P Labs Office Building.

We arrived at 99P Labs office in the late morning. To kick-start the day, we toured the office and followed that by facilitating a review of all the work we had done throughout Sprint 4 in the office’s collaborative space. After lunch, we dove into a generative activity in a setting that allowed for more whimsy, side tangents, and collaboration.

For the generative activity, we challenged all participants (client sponsors and all our team members) to divide into teams for an Alternative Worlds exercise to investigate how a successful organization or group outside the domain would approach our problem space. We assembled a diverse group of companies and organizations including Disney, Starbucks, Costco, and National Park Service. Through understanding these organizations’ culture, practices, and procedures, the teams were able to appropriate some aspects and came up with creative ideas for our project prompt. Adopting the perspective of a completely different domain was a novel way for us to shift our perspective and uncover some breakthrough ideas.

Co-design with our client sponsors in the participatory design activity.

Additionally, we introduced our participatory design activity — Communication is a Two-way Street. This design activity allows users to be placed into an environment that mimic the physical constraints of being on a people mover. We set up the design space with seats similar to the layout on public transportation. And we introduced the scenario which is set to be 50 years into the future. Then we asked participants to design a solution to send and receive information in response to an emergency situation. Through building with crafting material and demonstrating solutions in the design space, the participants showed their preferences of modality for communication channels based on physical restraints of a people mover.

Conceptual Prototype

Based on our insights generated from previous research and participatory design, we utilized a conceptual prototype to test some of our assumptions revolving around our users’ needs. We crafted a specific scenario:

A tourist is traveling to the airport to catch a red-eye flight.

This scenario indicated: 1) the user’s lack of familiarity to transportation system; 2) difficulty to travel at night; 3) need to limit uncertainty in order to reach the destination on time.

One of our five conceptual prototype storyboards

We created five different design solution in the form of storyboards for the same scenario. Then we conducted five interviews with transit users. The main takeaways from the validation include:

1. People don’t necessary want to own another gadget, oftentimes prefer solution over existing personal devices or built-in system.
2. People are concerned with technology inaccuracy, skeptical of technology capability, and worried about infrastructure break down.
3. People need to be able to use transit at their own time, and not have to be hypervigilant about missing stops.

Our goal moving forward from the conceptual prototype and validation is for the insights to inform our future prototype design.

Diary Study

We also completed a Diary Study this sprint, which taught about passengers’ varying experiences with transit across a longer period of time. Our learning goals for the diary study were the following:

1. What are passengers’ needs and expectations when they are using public transportation?
2. How might those needs and expectations vary from day to day?
3. With whom and with what do passengers interact when they are on public transport?
4. What are the end-to-end steps of someone’s transportation journey?
5. What do passengers enjoy about their transportation journey? What is something they wish could be different?

We were able to use dscout as our platform for this study. We learned about the transit journeys of 14 people in 10 cities across the U.S. Through their experiences in public transit, our team was able to bubble up several insights, some new and surprising, and others that validated findings from earlier research.

We affinity mapped our diary study findings within the framework of a user’s transit journey.

Here are a few of the things we found interesting from our diary study participants:

1. Passengers want real-time updates that are personalized but unobtrusive. Passengers want to be able to focus on things unrelated to their transit (a.k.a. Zone out, listen to music, read, etc.) without anxiety about how it will affect them reaching their destination.
2. Passengers’ perception of safety is influenced by the presence of other passengers both positively and negatively. They sometimes want to be able to engage with other passengers for information or conversation, but also want the ability to tune out or get away from a disruptive passenger.
3. Where passengers are seated and how many people are in the transportation affects how they can access resources. For example, a passengers’ location on a transit vehicle might impact whether or not they interact with the driver and they might seek information in a different way.

What’s next?

After lots of research this past month, our team is finally getting to take a step back and ask ourselves: “But what does it all mean?” This is where the rubber meets the road and we get to put our findings and insights to work, turning them into a testable prototype that will inform our final design this summer.

One way we plan to do that is by developing several scenarios that represent our insights, and designing prototypes for those scenarios. For example, how might a solution that serves a tourist in a new city taking a bus after dark be similar to or different from one that works for a commuter on their familiar daily ride?

Some of our open questions coming out of the research include:

1. Which scenarios best capture our insights and will provide a narrow frame through which we can design testable prototypes?
2. Which of these insights — specific to public transit — are most applicable in 99P’s vision of a People Mover?
3. What other transit scenarios should we conduct research that might generate insights more applicable to this People Mover?

Before we can ask these questions, though, we’re off to put together our final deliverables for the Spring semester! We’re excited to present what we’ve learned so far in the form of a research report, a presentation to our clients, and a website for the world to see. We’ll also be creating our first versions of a prototype which we’ll test with users in the coming weeks.

It’s been quite the ride, and we’re excited to share our learnings and see what the summer holds for Team Honda x 99P.

Follow 99P Labs here on Medium and on our Linkedin page for future updates on this project and other student research!

Image Sources:

Storyset by Freepik

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