Last week we at Team Whaleshark revised our concept to be an IoT smart home assistant that provides environmentally-friendly suggestions or visualizations. This device would also be able to communicate with others in the neighborhood and encourage communication between households in order to promote sustainable efforts and encouraging volunteering.
In a sense, our concept became quite lofty and we were unsure of where the boundaries of what it can and can not do lie. We also needed to expand our understanding of who would use this and how they would interact with it. This week, we focused on finding answers to these questions through creating personas, storyboards, speed dating, and affinity diagraming.
In class, we created personas for a sample user and for our AI (shown on the left). We wanted to get a sense of the personality, goals, and concerns of each persona, and how it can relate to helping the environment.
While discussing our AI’s persona, we begun to realize that its tone would be very important. If it’s trying to tell people to do things and how to do these things, we need to make sure we get this right. We don’t want users to feel that this AI is like their mother and always nagging them to do something they don’t want to do. That’s not going to help anyone do anything, (no disrespect to the mothers out there!)
Speed Dating
Next we talked about what visitations we might want to create in order to start showing off our concept through speed dating. The visual below shows some of our ideas. It’s pretty straight forward, but the on-boarding process, visualizations, and community connections were three main content areas that we wanted to explore and receive feedback on.
We let this be our guide to make some basic story boards exploring these content areas (below).
In short, we talked to multiple people, explained the various components of our storyboards and recorded the feedback.
Over the weekend, our team met to synthesize our results. Between the four of us, we met with over 15 friends, classmates, and peers and received some valuable feedback.
A few takeaways were:
- concern with privacy and what data would be shared
- explain during the on-boarding process what we are sharing, how we are sharing it, and why
- a desire for rich, helpful, and fulfilling visualizations
- a connection to volunteering can still be relevant, however it needs to be tightly tailored to the user’s interests and activities
- the frequency of actions & notifications can mean the difference between engagement and annoyance
- monetary incentives can override privacy concerns for some
- giving users a selection of goals to choose from is a good place to start, but customization of these goals should be an aim
- gamification and social challenges could be good incentives for some users, but not all users
- different people have different social goals and attitudes
- many people weren’t as excited about the communication features as we expected; they were happy to continue to use their phones to contact the people they know
- people were open to some community engagement, but more limited to local notifications such as street cleaning seemed to appeal to a broader audience
It was helpful to see key points of all of our conversations on the whiteboard in one place. We then took this information and worked to organize it into two lists. One for what Orion does in the home and the other for what Orion does in the community. Within each list were two sub-categories, what it can and can not do. Defining what our AI can do and what it’s not intended to do will go a long way to help us to scope our concept and make efficient use of our time and resources.
Our team meeting ended with addressing Orion’s community capabilities. To help us to continue to narrow this down, we all decided that it should be a device/AI system that promotes behavior change toward a positive environmental benefit. Possible features that we had been discussing, such as it being a personal assistant, no longer fit in with Orion’s objective.
Concepts such as data visualizations to help people be less wasteful and personalized community notifications for environmental events will fit in with our narrowed direction. But where do community events fit in? Should Orion help users to organize a neighborhood picnic? An event such as this would have no direct environmental benefit, but would it still be beneficial? This is a philosophical discussion that was not yet answered by our team, but something we hope to address in the coming week, as it will directly affect the scope of our project.
Were we to include an event management feature such as this, we will also need to address the idea of what should happen if people attempt to use this feature in ways that do not help the environment. Does Orion prevent this or does it allow it? We are looking forward to answering questions such as these as we move forward.
