There were thousands of times I doubted our project or even wanted to give it up. The reason for this mind is that the user research was not successful and we did not get enough feedback which may increase the risk of not fitting people’s attention eventually. But we do want to create something can help people gain motivation to get involved in gardens. So we tried our best to analyse all the limited feedback and extract human value from them.Then we came up with our current idea, Ezi-worm.
Highlight
Steve Jobs once asserted, “ True innovation comes from recognising an unmet need and designing a creative way to fill it.”
User-centered has always been our first principle during the design process. Our very early idea didn’t include the display box, just struggled how to represent data on the display screen beside a container. When we had a general idea about the display screen, I felt uncomfortable about this design and something must be missed. Then I assumed myself as a user, tried to experience every step and find out problems during the process. Suddenly, I found a serious problem, which is how can users know if the container is full before they take food scraps to the garden. Display box placed on the family kitchen bench can do some help to this problem. The box would show the data about container capacity and temperature in order to keep users informed of the conditions of the worm farm, building a connection between users and garden. In this way, people do not need to take left-over without a place to put in and can know when the container is very empty.
The purpose of our project is to promote people to make contributions to the garden, make them ‘do something good’. To achieve this goal, we have to consider how to make the product more convenient and pleasant to use, which is actually user-centred design. If the process is too tricky and inconvenient, their enthusiasm would get less and less until they forget it. This human-centred display box still has some problems to improve but at least the direction we follow is correct and meaningful.
The way to improve user experience can not just be designed by designers, user evaluation is the key. One interviewee from the last testing session suggested that reservoir (one more container for food scrap storage) can make this installation more convenient for people to use and easier for worms to survive because people can bring their left-over whenever they want and put them into the reservoir. The reservoir would transfer food to the main container automatically. This idea is pretty good and we may think more about it to add it to our worm farm.
No matter display box or reservoir, we both follow the human-centred design process. Human-centred design is about understanding people on their own terms, to make people like to be involved in this activity or do more interactions with the product, which is the same as the purpose of our project.
Advice
As an Interaction design student, we should have a better and deeper understanding for the user-centred design than people from the other fields. The purpose of human centred design is to create innovative products, services and solutions to promote user experience. The way to achieve this aim is to observe, understand and make. These steps can help us keep polishing our product and get more relative experience. Also, even if we have a lot of relating experience and have a very good understanding of people, we still need to keep repeating those steps because people are all changing with the society and technology development.
Something should be mentioned is that I learned a lot from the process. I don’t fear to code anymore because I tried and succeeded in this project. I enjoy designed and building a project from zero to one, which provided me much valuable experience and gained a sense of achievement. I’m still not a qualified designer, but I have a passion for it. And I love devoting time on designing good products and meet users’ needs.
I have to thank all the people in this project helped me before, especially my two nice teammates Jessalyn and Somi, and my talented tutor Peter. They make the design process meaningful, fun and educative.
