Case Study: Enhancing the user experience of a living room

An innovative way to watch TV in your comfort

This project had its existence when I enrolled myself for an UX mentorship in GrowthSchool. The process of working on this project was very exciting, filled with lots of unlearnings. Hope you find it informative and like the outcome.

The project was introduced to us a Design Thinking Project, as it primarily follows Design Thinking strategy for solving user problems. My cohort was then divided in groups of 10, and I was supposed to have 5 of them as my users for this project. I was given a certain area of the house, not the actual room, but a problem area to analyze on and come up with a solution.

The topic chosen by me was — Living Room.

This is a broad area to explore. The permutations of users having problems in this area are limitless. How to cover such a vast topic and land on a solution within weeks?

Keeping my self-doubts aside, I started with my journey.

Approach

My approach towards this project was through Design Thinking.

You may ask-

Fine, I get it. You have mentioned this term for quite a few times now. But what exactly is Design Thinking?

To start-off in simple words, Design Thinking is a process to understand users by empathizing with them, thus identifying their problems and try to innovate solutions. This is a non-linear and iterative journey towards problem solving altogether.

Empathize — Define — Ideate — Prototype — Test

Empathize

The very first thing which I unlearned as a part of this phase is, I am not the User. In order to analyze over user’s situation and identifying their problems, I completely detached myself from the scenario as a designer. This is required to understand user’s perspective without any bias.

Living room is an area which has a broad usage in user’s home. Every user may have their own set of scenarios. To understand their pain points better, I interviewed my users to get a direct response.

Here are the set of questions I used to conduct user interviews.

1. What is the location of your living room ? Is the entrance to your house in the living room ?

2. What kind of setup do you have in your living room w.r.t Furniture and Decors ?

3. How much is the capacity of your living area ? How is the sitting arrangement for the members of the room ?

4. Do you use your living room for storage ? What kind of storage ? Is it sufficient ? Any difficulties ?

5. Do you have pets/Toddlers ? If yes, how do they use this space ?

6. What kind of appliances are there in your living room ?

What is their purpose ? How frequently do you use them ? How is their usage ?

7. How do you clean your living room ? How often do you clean it ? Any difficulties in cleaning ?

8. Do you use your living room for working ? If yes, what is the setup ? Do you wish it to be more convenient ?

9. What kind of ventilation does your living room have ? Types of windows ? How is the view from your living room window ?

10. What is the one thing that you own that is a must have for your living room, without which your living room would be incomplete ?

11. What is the one thing that is missing from your living room ? Do you have plans to have it in the future ?

Below are the insights from productive conversations with my users.

Define

After collecting data from the users, its time to find insights from these data points about the potential problems that users are facing. Thus, in this phase we try to define user problems.

I tried to segregate the problems into categories :

• Aesthetic
• Materialistic
• Comfort

• I further elaborated on WHY these problems are important to be solved for the users.

Ideate

Now that I knew the user problems with possible explanations, it was time to ideate solutions on them. In this phase, we generally brainstorm over all the problems listed and try to design a solution for them.

The technique that used for this is conforming in all ways to its name!

Crazy 8 Method — I tried to come up with 8 possible solutions within 8 minutes for every user problem formulated in previous phase.

Crazy indeed right! This was the most daunting task of the project where I had to push my limits. Some of the ideas were very vague and hypothetical, however they surely brought value to the process. Few of them are listed below:

A thermal sensor which can adjust fan speed for ventilation, A device which can reshine wooden surfaces, A digital LED fridge cover to improve ambience, and what not.

Out of 87 ideas put together in this phase, I shortlisted Top 3 ideas for further analysis.

1.

A wall mount device for TV which can be pulled out, rotated vertically and horizontally (180 degrees) when needed
- Since 4/5 users I interviewed are facing this problem with TV-sitting space alignment in the living room, I decided to solve this problem. Also, it would elevate the experience of watching TV, further at a general scale in every household

2.

A compact storage/utility space for cosmetics and grooming activities with an attached foldable table, which can be pulled out when required
- This solution would not only help Sainath, but also all those users who have relatively lesser capacity for living rooms, making the most of available space. Hence, I picked this idea

3.

A portable study table with flexible table top and additional storage
- In the current scenario, as many users have adopted work from home setup, this solution would help them as well as Kanishka for a more comfortable work environment

Prototype

To proceed further with the prototype model, I finalized on the idea below:

A wall mount device for TV which can be pulled out, rotated vertically and horizontally (180 degrees) when needed

Reason: 4 out of 5 users that I interviewed had this problem in common. The aim was to enhance visibility of TV screen across all the areas of the room.

Approach: The core idea for this design was to introduce movement in the TV screen and make it flexible to be viewed across the living room.

I sketched a rough model of a possible initial design:

• Main view

I applied push-pull mechanism to a metallic arm which can be pulled out/pushed in horizontally as required. This arm can further rotate horizontally in 180 degrees to either side. Towards the end, I have placed a holder to which TV can be attached. This placement can be adjusted vertically in 30–45 degrees.

• Application

The mount enables the screen to be adjusted at any angle. This gives user to have arbitrary sitting position on sofa rather than fixing to a particular seat while watching TV.

This also enables user to utilize the sitting space over sofa more efficiently.

• Movement of the device

The sketch above elaborates the overall movement of device.

• Notations

A — Distance can be adjusted horizontally to improve the field of vision

B — Screen can be adjusted vertically

Testing

The best way to test a product is to have feedback from its users. So, I asked my users to convey their comments on my prototype. Given below is the feedback that I got from the users.

Is the frequent moving of TV screen safe? There is a fear of TV falling off

Pulling out of TV screen will cause an obstruction for people moving across the room

If the screen is moved in either direction, it would be inconvenient for people sitting across opposite side

Improvisations:

• I added 4 extended clips to the holder so that the TV screen can be attached to the device more firmly.
• An additional arm was added to the device, slightly modifying the push/pull mechanism to make it more flexible, so it will not an obstruction to the users.

Future Scope

As per feedback from one of my users, this design is most effective with limited number of users, where screen visibility needs to be adjusted in a particular direction, which is an add-on to their comfort.

However, this will not work if there are more number of users covering a large area of living room, in which case screen visibility is required in all the direction.

This can be treated as a limitation of the device. I will need to undertake more usability study and iterations of design thinking approach to resolve this problem.

Key Takeaways

Working on this project has been a surreal experience for me as I got an exposure on granularity of the process behind product design.

• Most critical learning was — I am not the user. To understand user problems and empathize with them, we need to keep our biases aside.
• Effective design for users is more important than perfection.
• Design thinking is an iterative process. We sometime need to repeat the process to improvise on our design.

Excited to come up with more of such Designs in the future.