Apr 2
Learning through Doing
A term for the title of this article is Kinesthetics learning, where people learn the most by doing, which is physically interacting with the world. Hands-on, you have to touch things, play with something and immerse yourself. It’s like a contact sport. One has to do it themselves. As a designer, I feel it’s one of many vital components in the design process. Learning to situate oneself in those experiences helps in understanding and empathize on a whole new level, which is a key aspect of designing anything.
What were we designing for ?
The case for this project was around designing a Cross Channel experience for a dining space. My team defined our opportunity space for an Ethnic/Cultural restaurant around our locality. Dining spaces and restaurants are pretty complex. There’s so much to a good dining experience than just-food. There’s a spectrum of experiences, a few ranging from our senses like visuals, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, and others from different aspects like recommendations, surprises, ambiance, and more.
“Increasingly, as designers of interactive systems (spaces, processes and products for people), we find ourselves stretching the limits of prototyping tools to explore and communicate what it will be like to interact with the things we design.” [Buchenau & Suri, 2000]
Post our initial research; we went through a series of discussions and “ideation” within the team to understand cross-channel experiences and our primary field study through observations. We wanted to explore how and where the pain points occurred, creating an Experience Map. This helped in creating a landscape in analyzing opportunity spaces.
Our initial process bought us a few concepts based on our rationale and understanding of the scope, filtering through our ideation phases, which helped generate many concepts.
“Ideation is the process of generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic, with no attempt to judge or evaluate them.” [Harley, 2017]
Our cohort also conducted a Gallery Walk, which has become an enriching experience for all of us in getting valued feedback, encourages designerly conversation, and helps evaluate our process and path that we have taken for our projects.
This helped in furthering our process. As a result, we finally came up with more refined concepts for highlighting the information flowing through different channels and touch points in this project’s cross-channel landscape.
Prototyping
“Design is realized through the manifestation and integration of ideal, if not always creative, concepts into the real world.” [Stolterman & Nelson, 2012]
Ideating and coming up with concepts are all pretty interesting and fun, but actualizing them into workable concepts is the real deal. One cannot directly implement their ideas straight off without trying or testing them. This is where Prototyping comes in.
“ ‘Prototypes’ are representations of a design made before final artifacts exist.” [Buchenau & Suri, 2000]
We created prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity to capture our design concepts and test them. Our concepts consisted of a mobile application, a smart dining table, and an informative to-go box for food leftovers and takeaway orders. The process of building these prototypes and testing them was fulfilling as a designer and a great learning experience.
Researching & Designing in UX UI is not just about probing, analyzing, conceptualizing, building, and transferring them to whoever is concerned. Such is a linear thought process, whereas there is so much more to all of this topography of design space. We often overlook the aspects of communication, fun, insights, documenting, reflecting, and more. One needs to think laterally, work together, and have fun while absorbing as much through the lens of not just a designer but also of what the situation demands.
Experience Prototyping
We decided to move forward with experience prototyping to examine our concepts. Why ?
There are quite a few factors that sway our decisions on choosing which methods to use and creating that distinction based on the designer’s scenario. For our case these were few of the rationale we analyzed
- One was time, with just limited time we had to merge low fidelity prototypes & high fidelity prototypes with the experience.
- Second was the context, for this project the context was about cross channel experience, prototyping a single app or a single concept would do no good as we wanted to evaluate how seamless and find more opportunities in the entire experience.
- Third was demonstration to understand the journey and observe through the lens of a designer.
Hence based on these and few more pointers we chose Experience prototyping to test our concepts.
“The main purpose of Experience Prototyping in this activity is in facilitating the exploration of possible solutions and directing the design team towards a more informed development of the user experience and the tangible components which create it.”(Buchenau & Suri,2000)
Key aspects we got to develop was a better understanding the essence of the experience in terms of relationships of users with artifacts and other relating aspects.(eg. For a dining experience it could be background commotion, seating, ambience etc). It also helped us in exploring and evaluating our ideas to based on the simulation of the experience.
We started by understanding the context the user is present in and all the touch-points that user will be encountering. The first and the last phase consisted of low fidelity paper prototypes of a mobile application.
Creating the Simulation
Setting up and observing the projected dining table was such a great experience to understand our design and highlight the affordances in designing a projected smart dining table. We created an impromptu setup to replicate an AR-based projected smart table to simulate the experience inside the restaurant while dining.
For this setup, we hung a projector to the ceiling while it was connected to a computer. High-fidelity prototypes of the AR smart table were projected onto the table and were controlled by a designer who was outside the scene.This helped the designer not only control the scene but also observe how the system is being experienced.
The process was essential for us as designers, we critically observed the interactions happening between the touch-points and designers at every channel.
Major Findings & Outcome
The designers who interacted with the dining table tried to carry forward their existing mental models of screen interaction onto the AR interaction. A key insight for us as were mainly with regards to the pros and cons of implementing the existing established patterns into a new medium like AR. as this would help users quickly understand the system but conversely limit the innovation of the AR interactive system.
Another key insight was that the designers tried to look for haptic feedback when they interacted with the table. which helped in discussing the feedback mechanisms that could be implemented into the existing system to provide some kind of feedback for the input given by the user.
My Experience
“Reflective practice is a dialogue of thinking and doing through which I become more skilful.” [Schön, 1994]
Reflecting on my experiences has become crucial as I grow irrespective of my domain. Whether cooking, designing or coding as and when we transition from a learner to a practitioner it is vital not just to work and demystify our process of work but also reflect. One key element that helps in doing so is ‘Documentation’ which we all do normally, but refrain from keeping it in order. Creating documentation is such a great skill not just for the individual or the team bit also the readers who might read through later on for reference.
Working on new skills like field study and observations, while strengthening my concepts of cross channel experiences as well as enhancing my knowledge of experience prototyping urged me to write this article. Special thanks to the very talented individuals I worked with and also to my professor for guiding us during this short project.
Keep learning & keep growing.
References
- Buchenau M., Suri J. F. (2000, August). Experience prototyping. In Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques
- Harley A.(2017). Ideation for Everyday Design Challenges — Nielsen Norman Group
- Nelson, H. G., & Stolterman, E. (2012). The design way: Intentional change in an unpredictable world. MIT press.
- Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic books.
