From a Different Perspective

If you ever get lost in the woods, there are generally two courses of
action. The stubborn hiker will keep on trudging through his
pre-determined path. The smart hiker will stop, take a look around, and if
need be, return towards the direction he came from. It’s easy to develop
tunnel vision when you’re designing, and it can prevent you from creating
good, user-centered design. This week, we dialed back our focus and opted
to look at our problem space again, from a different perspective. First we
reexamined the data we’d collected thus far. Writing our notes on
post-its, we rearranged how our insights connected to each other. It
proved to be useful to visualize our data in new ways. We saw that most
our responses, from general students and Guardian staff, centered on
issues with stands and their locations around campus.

In our weekly meeting, we started pulling from this information, and began
to search for inspiration from other sources. We started to build an
inspiration board, gathering photos of stands and other objects, which
could potentially serve as inspiration for us. As we move closer to
finding, prototyping and creating an actual solution, we are reminded to
stay grounded in our user data. Hopefully this way, we will be able to
design for the needs of the Guardian and the general UCSD student
population.