Stage 4: Refinement and Evaluative Research
Defining and refining a solution
Team: Corine Britto, Ema Karavdic, Anukriti Kedia, and Josh LeFevre
Exploring multiple concepts
After taking a short break on this project, we commenced by taking the best ideas from our generative research paired with the critique we received in order to set a direction on moving forward. What we decided was that it is important to take a step back and conduct some futuring activities in order to frame our concept and to develop a sense of the empathy space we specifically want to target. By exploring the cone of possibilities and the future state we could have two data points by which to evaluate our concepts; 1) our design principles and 2) how does our solution help us get to a future state twenty years out.
So, that’s what we did, we went down the list of our key insights from the generative research and defined them by what they look like currently and what they could look like in twenty years with a midpoint goal.
We found this exercise super helpful to frame our ideation. This activity also helped us reconsider what was important for our design concept.
One of our key takeaways was that our ability to design for and achieve this future state; was dependent on our ability to create a space or ecosystem that helped all generations connect. Until this point we have been focused on the older baby boomers and younger millennials. However, to make our design concepts work, we really needed to implement a solution that created a stronger connection among all generations.
With this framing in mind, we tad a quick ideation session and developed seven storyboard concepts of ideas to speed date with various generations. Each story focuses on a different but important aspect of intergenerational connection. These categories were work, social, infrastructure, community, and learning/education.
For our speed dating, we want to know
- Which concept are people most drawn to? why?
- How well do you feel this concept fosters intergenerational interactions? why?
- Do you feel this is anything missing? What and why?
Here are the concepts:
Defining one idea
We started testing our storyboards with our target audience to see what spoke most to them as a context. We tested with 6 senior couples and 5 millennials to understand their preferences. We also had the opportunity to share these ideas with prospective applicants to CMU, to hear some more thoughts. What emerged from the millennials was the need for the purpose to engage with senior adults. This became an important framing in narrowing down from our ideas, to see which ones leveraged a pre-existing motivation or purpose to engage. We had some clear winners from the feedback from both the groups.
Next, we mapped the three ideas ( Restaurant meetups, Neighborhood vitalizations, Mentorship) which got the most momentum on a matrix to evaluate it against the brief and our design principles. We created a key to map each of these variables on a spectrum of strong to negligible assosciation. Our mentoring idea was the strongest in comparison to the others when it came to meeting our preset criteria, we decided to take this forward, with understanding where it needed to become stronger, and seeing what we could borrow from other ideas to integrate within this one.
Storyboarding a master concept:
For the next steps, each of us put together different storyboards for the mentorship concept and discussed what we felt were strengths and concerns of each idea. This we felt was integral to get the wheels moving, and to see how each of us was visualizing the same concept we had been discussing for a while.
The storyboards lead to some more integral discussions around what were key differentiating points for us and what were some questions still left to be answered through our next round of user research, regarding the knowledge, skills, and interests of these extreme target groups that we had narrowed down on. We also had a more nuanced way of defining scale at the end of this, with a focus on creating more local communities instead of scaling for scale’s sake.
Another visit to Vintage:
Post our last discussion, it was time for another consolidated version of our storyboard and another visit to Vintage was due. Anukriti visited the Vintage Senior Centre with our new storyboard to test it out with some participants there. It was a happy moment to reunite with participants who have been a part of our exploratory and generative research process. We heard some extremely positive feedback from them and learned that this model was actually a great leverage point to allow them to contribute to their community, something that they were inherently interested in. We also saw that both our participants at Vintage were particularly interested in learning with a friend as an option, and were technologically well equipped in comparison to some of earlier assumptions.
Exploring motivations and empathy:
We took some time on Saturday to discuss the role of our platform, and how can we better map it to motivations and empathy, while situating it in a community. We found it important to consider not just extrinsic discounts but also intrinsic motivation nudges which would allow our users to keep indulging in the app and in helping others. As a part of this, we introduced gratitude cards and social capital badges as an idea to explore some of these intrinsic motivations. We also found ourselves contemplating the different ways in which we can look at empathy within the app, and soon realized that empathy had to work through many touch points and not just one, to build a more integrated system for its practice.
Next, we further iterated on some of these ideas, with each of focussing on a different stage in the user’s journey. Our focus for this round was to move from storyboards to sketched out wireframes to start discussing the features and UX of the app. It was time to make things more fleshed out!
Testing our idea
This week we dove straight into digitizing the sketched wireframes so that we could conduct mid fidelity testing with potential users. Although our platform is one that anyone could use, we have been trying to test with the more extreme portions of our potential users. We’ve chosen to do this for a few reasons:
- Motivation in younger adults given time constraints has always been a big question mark for us that we’ve wanted to resolve
- Testing for failure: we wanted to test the usability of an app interface for older adults and see whether they had any challenges
- Getting these two generations to potentially link is more challenging than generations that are more similar to each other
In total, we tested with 14 participants — 12 older adults and 2 younger adults — testing our concept for failure by working with extreme users, particularly those not entirely comfortable with a mobile interface. We wanted to push ourselves to consider inclusive design and we could not rely on our own experiences as we are digital natives and do not have experience with the concerns of those that do not have the same bodily functionality.
The main source of our participants was Osher, the lifelong learning center at CMU. This was an extremely valuable resource to us, offering a large diversity of older adults that were willing and able to come to the studio to give feedback on the mid-fidelity designs. It’s worth noting that while they were diverse in age and some aspects of life experience, these individuals were college educated and generally more privileged than the average resident. We spoke to Peter and Bruce about this and our concerns for the way that they may skew results. They advised that given this is a learning platform, it wasn’t a big leap that those most interested may be college educated retirees and that this could be our target population starting point. It was possible to grow from there. Through our research into Pew data, we also found that the higher the education level, the more likely individuals were to have mobile phones and feel more comfortable with technology.
Once we completed interviews, we synthesized our insights to understand any overarching elements that people found confusing about our concept and the deeper feature level changes that needed to be made.
Some really interesting insights came out:
- Many felt that the language we used made the platform feel like a dating app, which turned them right off. We concluded that it wasn’t so much the stigma for the dating apps but the implications of the very different kinds of relationships they were looking for
- Security was a huge feature for older adults. While we had included a verification element in onboarding, older adults needed more emphasis. This came from a level of unfamiliarity on the internet and also a fear of being scammed
- Gender considerations needed to be made for subtle implications of expertise and mentorship, especially for non-career related skills. It was interesting to hear that some women do not see themselves as experts despite their length of experience. This is another framing and language element that we want to consider doing forward
- We had two people who felt that they would never use the app. This helped us crystallize that our app was tailored towards people who may not usually have a large community on LinkedIn for their professions (e.g. blue collar workers) or those who don’t work in a more typical, hierarchical work place where mentorship is more embedded (e.g. start ups)
As we began to prepare for our presentation, we began to articulate what this platform was and what it wasn’t to make sure that, as a team, we were all on the same page. This meant that we could communicate this clearly to an audience who wasn’t as immersed in the issue as we were.
We also began to draw clear connections to the brief to ensure that it wasn’t lost in the process of designing all the details of the platform features. We concluded that our inclusion of empathy was predominantly seen in three major ways:
- The creation of an online and offline community
- Utilizing inclusive design
- Pushing continuous, face to face interactions through learning by leveraging common interests
To be most effective for our upcoming presentation, we split the team into two. Two people would work on the iteration of the designs and add some basic visual design and the other two would work on creating the story arc for the presentation. This worked well for our team as we kept each other in the loop and shared links that made progress readily available.
Presentation Dry Run
We met to review an outline of our presentaion. We decided to show our futuring process and how our current intervention could lead to that ideal future. We also wanted to emphasize the face to face aspect of our empathy definition and how we show empathy for the user through accessibility features .
After crafting a draft of our story, we reviewed it with Peter. With nearly a semesters worth of work behind us, it is getting harder to know what is most essential to our concept. We also needed advice on where to place our empathy research and how much focus to place on potential partnerships. This is the feedback we received:
Peter explained the importance of keeping our solution place, not space based.
He urged us to include a system level map
He was confused about the connection with LinkedIn. Josh clarified it could be an expansion of Linked in Learning.
We strategically placed the empathy definition and research at the end. There was concern that newcomers would not understand what led to the concept.
Our story featured and older man looking to learn from a younger person. The younger person then happens to learn about the older person’s skills. They questioned what would motivate a younger person to learn from an older person. Katie wished for motivations for young and old should be clear on the outset.
Evaluative Testing Presentation
The feedback on our presentation was quite positive:
What worked:
Margaret loved our through and comprehensive consideration of accessibility and privacy.
Ben loved how we were lowering the barrier to giving back and finding others with common interests.
Questions:
How does one discover their own skills?
How do you find out about the service?
Is it possible to discover someone’s skills randomly?
Are there age limits?
Can groups with similar skills and interests meet together?
Suggestions:
We should visualize our theory of how empathy is built over time
