Sprint 2: A New Perspective

We are a student group from Carnegie Mellon University studying Human-Computer Interaction. We partnered with InterDigital to create future experiences that are powered by technologies developed with people in mind, and we bring the people perspective to the project.
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Reframing our problem statement

…So what’s our problem statement? We deconstructed our project prompt last sprint which gave us a better overall understanding of it. However, finding the “right” step to take next was the difficult part. There were so many possible routes we could take because of the broad nature of the project. We tried to look at our problem statement from diverse perspectives.

Our original research question was,

“In the future, what experiences will be possible, and what technologies would support them?” This was a difficult question to answer because we needed to think about something too abstract. However, when we reframed the question to “Why do people adopt certain new technologies?”, we moved the timeline from the future to the present which made it a little easier for us to take action. Although this felt like a strong enough question, through our discussion, we reframed it again to, “Why have people not adopted all the tech available so far?”.

If we could find specific factors that prevented people from accepting new technologies as part of their lives, maybe we could design new technologies in a way that eliminates such factors.

Natural & Autonomous

With our reframed problem statement in mind, we moved on to synthesizing our research and the second part of the kickoff. After hours of discussion and passionate writings on the whiteboard, we came up with 5 hypotheses.

1. New interaction should be natural & independent from the device.
2. Context-aware technology will improve the quality of experience. Here, context is not limited to the user’s physical environment but also extends to their feelings, health, etc.
3. Adoption will happen slowly and naturally, rather than radically.
4. Technology should be supportive and give users autonomy for long-term adoption.
5. To make people adopt new technologies, there has to be compelling reasons, and the gap of the quality of experience must be big.

We extracted two main keywords regarding what factors are needed for people to adopt new technologies.

In the first week of the sprint, we focused on creating rough prototypes that gave us meaningful insights on what “natural experience” could mean in the future. Some of the technologies we dived into were creative input/output, VR, AR, Holograms, IoT, and sensors. We quickly built physical prototypes based on our research and tested them on possible users.

Pictures from user testing sessions

Below are our insights from our user testing sessions.

Through the sessions, we felt that we brushed up on what users perceived was a natural interaction. At the same time, we felt that we needed to explore this area more by moving our focus to the diverse input and output methods that would create such natural experiences. After talking to our faculty advisors on our next steps, we decided to spend a week more on learning more about natural experience through interviews, readings, and storyboards. We look forward to what we will learn next week!

*This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.