Redesigning a Car for Older Users: A Class project
One of the first projects I ever got involved in my graduate school career was taking on the challenge of a product redesign. we had a class of 5 so we were not split up but we went in as a single team. It was our goal to redesign a product going through the steps of an iterative design process at the time and We decided to do one that was close to our hearts.
Essentially we decided to make it easier for our parents to drive.
We did have limitations as we had to develop prototypes so we weren’t able to modify anything too heavily or make a proposal that wouldn’t be doable at our end.
Starting off:
None of us were old enough to qualify as an “older driver” so we had to turn to anyone old enough to have problems with driving for this insight so we called up our parents to ask them questions. Fortunately for me, My parents came and visited me in Idaho, so I got to watch my dad and see him in action. He drove very slowly and deliberately, every action he made was intentional. when he turned the wheel it was like watching a slow motion version of myself in action. When asking him what was going on when he was driving, he said his hands hurt and that it was not easy to turn the wheel for him anymore, he had arthritis and it was showing. one thing he did do a lot was grip the flat part of the steering wheel to turn, which gave me an idea of what I could contribute to the improvement of the vehicle, the steering wheel.
But before we moved forward, we decided as a team it would be best to develop personas detailing the issues our interviews revealed. it would give us direction for how we would redesign the car.
Building Personas
We built 3 personas from our interviews to give us direction to design. It made our purpose a little more realistic feeling as we had images of the kind of people we were designing for:



The thing I must say, is that there wasn’t a lot of science to designing our personas, it was more of an art form when we came up with them. I do wish we did more scientific work with personas or had more direction, but this was a starting point to improve on!
Prototyping
Once we had our personas, we all agreed to address different aspects that would help our personas get about their daily lives easier. the parts we chose were seatbelts, steering wheel (ME), step stool, and door holder,

For the purpose of this project, we didn’t really get to test out our wheels with participants due to a lack of time to recruit and filter out participants. but we did get to spend a bit of time learning how to craft and develop them!
We bought styrofoam circles and slapped some cardboard in them for the inside, then we worked on each design and we really just went about internally to test it. we even slapped it on a base to make it feel more like it was testable.

Online Teamwork, its a problem
While working in person as a team was a fantastic experience, we really learned the struggle that was working with an online team. While we were churning out ideas and putting together a project, we had no idea where our other team members were at. While we made prototypes, and showed them to each other, we had back and forth with our online team to see what was going on. The day before our presentation, we had ended up getting the product of our team being separate. It was like walking into a burning building with only an extinguisher, there was a stark difference between the level of effort of the online students and the in person students we had to figure out what parts to include and remove in our presentation to save face. We were lucky our professor was relaxed and was less critical of the work than we were, We got an A and learned that it is not easy to work with people from a distance. I learned that we need to make it clear what page we are at for all team members and to keep logs of where everyone is at to ensure that we are making changes.