Introduction:

After organizing our data using an affinity diagram last week, we took our next step into the project and began ideation. At first we started by thinking about questions to serve as our main issue to address with our product solution and ended up choosing: “How might we create a space in which students are encouraged to interact?’ Afterwards we started flash prototyping ideas to address it. After coming up with a variety of ideas, we chose one prototype that we were interested in working with: interactive charging stations where you can charge your devices and simultaneously chat or play games with another person seated at another charging station. We created parallel prototypes for it, where one is based on randomization of who you interact with and what activity you both undertake and the other is based on choice where you choose the activity you want to partake in and choose someone seated at another table with the same activity preferences. Now that we have prototypes ready we’re excited to get feedback from users and see what they have to say about it!

To hear more about our thoughts on the process, check out what each of us has to say:

“This week was exciting as we finally got to gather our ideas for a few prototypes. Which of course means we also got to play with pipe­cleaners, a lot more post­its and some index cards. The process of choosing a ‘how might we…’ question to fit our specific situation was a fun and interesting way to approach the problem keeping our focus as user centered as possible and helping us avoid zeroing in too early on one solution. That said, imagining a scenario while building our prototypes for the ‘InterCUBE’ made it feel like we’re making progress and I’m looking forward to testing the new prototypes on our users.”

Best,

Turtle

Some of the “How might we…” questions we thought of:

“Figuring out what questions we wanted to solve within our own system helped our group figure out exactly what aspects we should be hitting with our design. We’ve finally moved on from ideation to prototyping and it’s full speed ahead. Our group spent a good portion of our three hour block word vomiting and seeing where our ideas took us. We threw our ideas on the table and more and more ideas stemmed from there. Those ideas included: a large interactive Yik­Yak­esque board, a giant hopscotch track along Library Walk, a hover bubble game, a park in the middle of Price Center Plaza, and a charging station. In the end, we decided to further pursue the idea of charging stations all across campus. I think this is something that can appeal to all students. Hopefully we can build something even greater.”

Best Regards,

Lion

“This week was really the most exciting week thus far. We were finally able to gather all of our data and understand exactly what kind of solution system we wanted to offer our users. After ideating about potential solutions, we came across the idea of a charging station called interCUBE that will allow students to interact with others and also allow students to do what we all know they want to do­­charge their phones. We parallel prototyped, and we are looking forward to A/B testing, and understanding how we can best meet the needs of our users!”

Cheers,

Ocelot

A venn diagram of the interCUBE before we prototyped, with possible locations for it

throughout campus:

“At the beginning of this assignment, we were interested in making transportation around UCSD campus, a safe and efficient process. Over our interviews, we discovered that students also saw transportation around campus as an enjoyable experience, which transformed the very way we looked at the project. Rather than focusing on efficiency, we discovered that what better way to address user needs than to look into how we can make traveling pleasurable for UCSD students on­campus. Within traveling, we discovered that traveling throughout campus was not only a matter of the process but also the end­goal, reaching the desired destination. After series of interviews and re­evaluating our problem space based on the user feedback, we narrowed down our project focus to ‘How might we make a space that encourages students to interact?’ We came up with many ideas, but we chose interCUBE in order to encourage students to broaden their social network beyond their inset social groups and to meet new people. With prototypes in hand, I am looking forward to interviewing students and testing our prototypes with them to see what they think of it and to re­evaluate whether or not it truly addresses our focus.”

Take it easy,

Whale