Small Physical Piece Iterations

April 25th-May 8th

Rough Prototype

April 25th

The rough prototype was done before the visual palette was decided. This one was for testing out the relative scale and content in the kit.

Working Prototype

April 29th

We made some working prototype by Sunday to test out the kit during the week. I made it in the color palette that is matching the theme, and printed on post-it notes.

Trial day 1

participant A:

• The scale matches the size of the fridge.
• The space of the goals felt a bit small, maybe tighten up the prompts and making it in a smaller font
• For one sticky note, I forgot to write down on the spot, but I could still clearly remember how much I spent for that meal. Maybe just logging it per day is still effective?

participant C:

• The sticky notes pack is really handy since it is portable
• It would be nice to have a place to keep track of the date, restaurant name, and meal since I will likely forget later
• Currently there is not a spot to hold my filled stickies in the sticky pack before I get the chance to put it on my fridge
• I like how the goal is there to remind me of what I’m working towards

Trial Day 2

participant C:

Trial Day 3

participant C:

• I’m becoming more aware of my spending habits, because at entropy today I decided not to buy anything since I didn’t want to make a sticky for it.
• However, it’s still hard to say when a friend asks to eat out.

Trial Day 4

participant C:

• I keep eating out and I think I’m aware of my spending but I don’t know if I’m on track to reaching my goal or what I have to do to reach it. I probably should have figured that out before the beginning of the week.

Trial Day 5

participant C:

• I didn’t eat out today! I learned that a lot of people in my house have seen my expenses now. I told my roommate that I recently ate at this Indian place and she said she already saw because it was on the fridge. This then sparked conversation about the project.
• This system works well on the refrigerator if you are living around people you are comfortable with and they are okay with it. Having it public also adds pressure to reach your goal. However, this system could also live in your private bedroom on a magnetic white board, etc. depending on the comfort of the user.

Trial Day 6

participant C:

• I’ve been updating my system later in the day, after the fact that I ate out.

Trial Day 7

participant C:

Reflecting back on my week:

• The system is a good way to track expenses. One of my housemates mentioned that this is “so cute” and something they’ve would want to do.
• Privacy and public use of the system depends on how the user feels.
• It would be nice for there be a prompt for the user to reflect on how to reach their goal before, during, and after the week. However, this might be outside the scope of this project.

Packaging Prototyping

May 2nd

After trying to make the milk carton packaging myself, I realized that the only way to hold it together is to open on the top. If we cut the sides open to reveal the kit, the shape won’t stay together.

Packaging prototype with graphics

May 4th

To stick with our final color palette (show on the left), I readjusted all the graphics in the kit. To see a full exploration of the graphics, see branding iterations post in this publication.

After further discussion with Stacie and TAs, we decided to print the milk carton on a harder sheet of paper, so the milk carton will stay in shape.

After experimenting different font sizes and color choices, the final graphics is shown below:

The graphics elements all adapts the paper art style with layering and drop shadows, and more tips are added to each category. I also modified the text to a smaller font. For the magnets, since the magnets that we got was square shaped, we thought it might be better to just to a rectangular shape for the days in the week. Here are the templates for the cartons:

actual mock up on regular paper (very flimsy)

Final Prototype

May 7th

We built the milk carton with stiff paper and cut the sticky notes into cow-spot shapes. Although the spots came out a colder color than the original because of some printing issues, it still looks visually consistent because of the shape.

We tried out the kit user journey — opening the carton, cutting out the kit, and putting them up on the fridge:

and we tried to give them out to people, together with our spatial piece: