Sprint 2: Deep Dive into the Three Domains X Technologies
At the end of Sprint 1, we began to plan our next steps to tackle this broad topic of 6G with three domains of interest in mind — Smart Environment (smart home/city), Entertainment, and Games. Instead of narrowing it down, we consider it a strategy to approach users and experts in the technical research field and domains closer to the users.
Research Questions
Around the topic of 6G, we developed 6 guiding questions that will lead to a meaningful understanding through human-centered design. In our current plan, we are looking closely at the first two questions:
- What are some deep-rooted user behaviors and patterns that will be relevant even if the technology landscape changes?
- What are the future state and trends for the next decade in entertainment, gaming, and smart cities?
We noticed it’s very abstract to ask users directly about internet usage to gain insights from 6G. Our workaround is to approach users with certain fields on which 6G is most likely to have an impact. With this in mind, we planned two activities for our first research sprint — domain expert interview and collaborative speed dating. Upon agreement, the team split into halves to work on the material preparation, recruiting, and conducting.
Preliminary Ideation
Before we came up with the above plan and split up, we began with an ideation exercise for us to explore the scope of the three domains. Using the Crazy 8’s method, we broadly ideated some future states of the three industries. Our team shared and presented dozens of ideas internally. Besides generating materials for user sessions, the activity also helped us get out hands into the vast design opportunities out there.
We chose the highly voted ideas in all 3 domains and developed detailed storyboards around them. We planned to diverge these storyboards into different risk levels for a speed dating session with actual users.
Domain Expert Interviews
From the secondary research we have completed so far, we are not sure if our vision in the three domains aligns with actual experts in the fields. We plan to conduct domain expert interviews in gaming, entertainment, and smart environment, from the industry to academia.
We hope to learn from domain-specific knowledge about the core values provided to the users, how to evaluate/validate them, and the future trend. We are curious about future narratives across industries’ narratives, especially how they align and differ from the technical R&D perspective that our client already provided us. Their insights will be synthesized and integrated into our future user research strategies.
Collaborative Speed Dating
Speed dating came naturally as our next activity for our storyboards. However, we realize that making users resonate with future scenarios might not be the most efficient way for us.
Based on faculty advice, we decided to modify the methods to be more participatory. Upon recognizing the opportunities and risks in our storyboards, users can directly suggest a preferred version with the incomplete partial storyboards we prepared.
To evoke user reaction more effectively, we dial the risk level high up for the storyboard to be presented. For example, here is a storyboard where users can augment reality into game objects with future AR devices and eventually get lost in the immersion.
The partial storyboards only state the context of the technology and scope in the first few panel with no further development. We invite the users to imagine with us what the potential future would be, and analyze the completed artifacts later.
Next Steps
By the end of Sprint 2, all the materials for the two activities are finished and reviewed across the whole team. We have scheduled most expert interviews and even conducted a few already. The recruitment process for speed dating is starting as well.
We plan to wrap up these activities in the first week of Sprint 3 with some of the findings already synthesized. We’ll undoubtedly learn a lot from all the participants, and affinity diagraming sounds like an excellent strategy to make sense of the insights. On Friday, a partial diagram should be ready for review by both faculties and the client.
Last but not least, we also want to think about prototyping the super lo-fi prototype to test out the viability product idea quickly. We hope to get inspiration from the speed dating result and derive several pretotype ideas to build quickly (and fail quickly).
