UX Case Study: Designing a better living room experience
The main goal of this project is to present a case study using Design Thinking to enhance the experience of the Living room.
Hey there! My name is Anshul Chowdhury a graphic designer, nutrition and fitness consultant, and also an aspiring UX designer. I have been interested in the field of UX for quite a while now but most of the courses I saw had a very textbook approach but then I found my mentor Anudeep Ayyagiri whose approach to non-textbook learning resonated with me a lot.
Thank you for taking the time to go through my work, I hope you like what you read.
The reason I chose the living space was partly that my current living room is nonexistent, so I wanted to know how other users interact with the space on a day-to-day basis. I didn’t want my bias to seep into the case study as well so this particular area was perfect.
So, let’s start the project by actually knowing what exactly is ‘Design Thinking’.
Design Thinking
Design thinking is a recursive process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test.
It is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.
Design thinking is extremely user-centric. It focuses on humans first and foremost, seeking to understand people’s needs and come up with effective solutions to meet those needs.
Design Thinking involves 5 stages :
Empathize :
The Empathize stage is the first stage which is meant to know and understand our users and the problems that they face.
To know my users I had to conduct 1-on-1 interviews with them, so I created a questionnaire by keeping in mind what my mentor told me, that the interview should be conversational in nature, the questions asked shouldn’t be a question with one-word answers and it should be history based questions. The questions that I asked were at times modified as well as extended based on the user’s response.
My questions were as follows :
Where is the living room concerning your front door?
How often did you use the living room the previous week?
What are the activities that you like to do in your living room?
Does your living room double up as something? if yes can you please let me know what?
If your friends come over where would you guys hang around at your place?
Can you let me know about any fun memory in your living room?
What is the lighting and ventilation situation like in your living room?
Does your living room have any appliances present and can you let me know about them?
What are the likes and dislikes about the area if any? Also can you please elaborate on them?
During the interviews I listened to the users carefully and didn’t try to give my inputs or solutions in the interview itself, the first interview wasn’t that great but I was getting better at it with every subsequent interview. I also asked a couple of my users to share pictures of the living room to get a better idea.
My findings from the interviews are listed below:
Define:
In this stage analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you have identified.
After collecting the necessary data I moved on to the define stage where it was time for me to identify the problems from the insights that were gathered.
Based on the notes that I made while interviewing the users, I identified and made a list of the problems faced by the users :
Bad TV viewing angle: Ridham has to sit uncomfortably to view the television as it’s on a side viewing angle with respect to the sofa.
Hot Temperature: Vyshak’s living area is considerably hotter because of the lack of ventilation and the area being exposed to the sun for a longer period.
Uncomfortable seating :
- Aditi has to sit on the sofa and lean forward to work, this uncomfortable posture for prolonged work hours gets painful.
- Abhishek’s sofa is not very comfortable to sit on.
Untidy Area: Because of the bigger family stuff is scattered all around the living room as it’s the first area that comes up when entering the house from the outside.
The disturbance caused by Background noise: Aditi and Sreelekha get distracted or disturbed by the background noise coming from the kitchen or other rooms.
Empty Area: Abhishek has a lot of unused space present in the area which doesn’t look very presentable when guests come over.
While going through this stage I understood the importance of keeping your bias aside and not letting it seep in as I am not the user and my opinions should not be taken into account because the goal is to solve the user’s problem and make their experience better.
Ideate:
In the Ideate stage, you start thinking about the solutions to the problems faced by the users.
This is an interesting stage as after listening to all the problems faced by the user you finally move on to generate a huge number of ideas which can be later filtered to pick the best and most practical one to design better solutions. to generate a huge number of ideas I was asked to follow the crazy 8 technique which is setting up a timer for 8 mins and coming up with 8 ideas for each problem, I came up with 30 ideas which are listed below :
A) Bad TV viewing angle
1. Moving the sofa in the direction of the TV.
2. Keeping /attaching the tv in front of the sofa wall.
3. Adding an adjustable wall bracket with which you can freely move the TV in whichever direction you want.
B) Hot Temperature
4. Adding an air conditioner or a cooler in the room.
5. Reflective paint on the outside
C) Uncomfortable Seating
User Aditi:
6. Setting up a table in the corner of the room.
7. Collapsible desk to work on.
8. A coffee table that doubles up as a work table.
9. Detachable and foldable workstation that can attach itself to the sofa.
10. A roll-out table attached to the TV cabinet that can work as a table.
11. Small foldable table that can be kept on top of sofa which can act as a table/workspace.
User Abhishek :
12. Removing the Cushioning of the sofa and applying a new one
13. Replacing the sofa with a mattress for a better seating area as well as comfortability.
14. Replacing the sofa with individual cushioned stools.
15. Getting an inflatable sofa which will be comfortable and easy to move.
16. A long bean bag with similar seating capacity.
17. Changing the sofa and buying a new one.
D) Untidy Area :
18. A small inexpensive hangar to hang the stuff that is scattered.
19. A modular cabinet that folds down to hang extra stuff.
20. A small basket at the side to keep the things in
21. A wooden cabinet.
E) Disturbance caused by background noise
22. Moving to a different area.
23. Noise-canceling headphones.
24. A completely foldable wall that separates the room.
25. Foldable acoustic fabric drop-down wall attached to the ceiling.
F) Empty Area
26. Buying and putting up the artwork.
27. Getting magnetic metal posters with multiple designs in one single piece.
28. Applying digital frames on walls that can display multiple pictures or artwork.
29. Putting up shelves in the area to set up a small library.
30. A wall-mounted table to add some more electronic equipment.
Here, we need to understand that we cannot solve all the problems. So, to move ahead I had to identify and shortlist solutions that could be implemented.
The top 3 ideas I chose were :
- Foldable Acoustic drop-down wall: A drop-down wall attached to the ceiling made up of acoustic fabric panels that would not only stop the noise but also divide the area.
- Coffee Table that can transform into a work table: A small coffee table with a movable top, the top part of the table can move up to increase the height appropriately so that the user can use it as a workstation.
- Detachable and foldable desk: An attachable desk that can attach itself on to the sofa without any nuts or screws and can be used as a worktable.
Prototype :
In this stage, you create a rough prototype of the idea based on the solutions ideated in the previous stage.
It is a crucial part of the design thinking process as it helps designers to test their design before making the final product. The idea is to have a simple visual representation of the solutions discussed in the ideation stage.
Of the three ideas that I have stated above, I went forward with the second idea which is the Transforming Coffee Table for prototype and testing.
The Solution
The prototype I built was a basic coffee table, the tabletop extend up in height, and it also had a storage area where the user can keep their work-related stuff right there on the table for their convenience.
- The table measures 23.6”x47.2” with a height of 20”, it also has a depth of 8” under the extending top which is enough to keep a laptop, charger, and other work-related stuff.
- As the top part moves up the user won’t have to bend down to type/write on the table thus the posture stays neutral and the user won’t feel the pain in the back or shoulders.
- There is also a hollow storage area at the foot of the table.
Testing :
In this stage, we get to validate our solution with the end user.
I went back to the users to gather feedback on different aspects, if the user is satisfied with the current prototype then the Design Thinking process would come to an end here but if the users are not at all satisfied with the product then the whole process would start from scratch again considering their feedback (that is why this is an iterative process).
I got to test my prototype with 5 of the users, the prototype was appreciated by everyone, they liked the storage feature just under the extending table. The users also provided me with some constructive feedback that will be helpful to make iterations to the prototype and make it better.
Feedbacks :
User 1
A charging system to keep the products charged would be very viable.
User 3
The table should be opaque so that the things kept inside are visible.
User 4
The storage near the bottom of the table will collect a lot of dust as it’s not covered.
User 5
It doesn’t look like the table can be easily moved from one room to another when the need arises.
Taking into account the time taken and having learned that there is always room for improvement, I chose to iterate a couple of things from the feedback received.
Revised Prototype
Identified the problem: The product would be very tough to move if the need arises and because of the open storage area the things kept in there will get dusty.
Solution: To make the table portable wheels were added onto the table, the wheels also have locks so that they can stay in one place when the table is getting used for work, to solve the issue of dust accumulation sliding boards were added to cover the lower part.
Key Learnings
- I got rid of my perfectionist mentality, I realized that it’s okay to make mistakes and it is very important to learn from them.
- I learned that I am not the user and I am not designing for myself but the users.
- I realized that to get the proper answers I need to ask the correct questions.
- One of the biggest learnings from this project is that I have a lot of unlearning to do before I try to learn things.
This marks the end of my first UX case study project, this project gave me an opportunity to learn a lot of new things. I hope you liked the article as much as I liked working on it.
Looking forward to working on more exciting projects such as this one shortly.