Are We There Yet…?
Our summer road trip begins . . .
Welcome to our first update of the summer semester, where the team will evolve from a mindset of uncovering insights for innovation to “building to learn” (quickly!).
Wrapping up our spring deliverables
In our last update we spoke about how we were planning to wrap the findings from our research phase in the spring semester into a generative opportunity space. On May 12, the team presented our results from the spring to our 99P clients, MHCI faculty, and our colleagues from the program.
Overall we found that there was a gap emerging in how people were perceiving time in the car and how they were actually using time spent in the car. On the one hand we learned that time in the car felt lost and time spent in transit was overlooked and underutilized. On the other hand, the space of the car is an under explored escape for the demands of everyday life and the unique constraints of the car make it a unique space to have meaningful connections.
Our insights revealed a gap:
Valuable time was there for the taking and the car was a unique space to make the most of that time.
Within this gap we found our direction for the summer semester:
Moving to a summer state of mind…and did we mention? We’re all in person now!
Thanks to the team being fully vaccinated and a few members moving house, for the first time in our project we are all together, and taking full advantage of it. No whiteboard is safe and no Post It unstuck. We have been going 100MPH and loving every second of it.
Our first task of the summer was narrowing our opportunity space into something we could test and learn from given the tight timeline of the summer semester. As a first step we came up with as many ideas as we could as to how we could turn this time in the car into meaningful connections.
We used enactments to bring our ideas to life as quickly as possible (80% of the team taking an improv class helped with this!). We spontaneously moved 4 chairs into a car-like configuration and played a video of a drive on a TV in front of us. We then acted out as many ideas as possible to see what was interesting and where challenges might lie.
Needless to say, we had a blast doing this and it helped us narrow our opportunity space. The idea of play as a means of connection became apparent in a number of our enactments. After some quick domain research, we decided to focus on play as a way to help establish shared presence and purpose between those in the car. Our ideal target would be families with children between the ages of 4–10.
Our guiding question for the summer:
Can play help establish a shared presence between families in the car during short term drives?
Sprint 1
Working in 2 week sprint cycles, we turned our attention to building a prototype we could learn from as quickly as possible. We had our guiding design question now we had to put it to work.
When thinking about our prototype we had to keep two constraints top of mind:
- Ensure we could learn something quickly from our prototype to carry forward
- Design prototypes that leverage the unique attributes of the car space and what a car can provide for people. We always had to answer the question: ‘Why is this unique to the car?’, in order to ensure we were tracking toward value creation for our clients.
With these constraints in mind the team began the sprint process of determining our hypothesis, mapping the experience, ideating and executing a prototype.
With shorter duration trips as our area of focus, we remembered our users saying that the school drop off was a tough moment to have a real conversation. Often questions like “ how was your day?’ Would be met with the ‘fine’ or ‘OK’. We thought maybe our idea of play, specifically the idea of co-creating a narrative, might help make these conversations more fruitful.
With that our sprint 1 hypothesis was born:
Interactions that enable co-creating narratives are effective at overcoming barriers of connection.
Specifically we were going to create a conversational-agent-lead experience that leveraged location based data from the car to enable the riders to co-create a story together. We chose a route and drove it a few times picking interesting items along the way to build our narrative experience on. We then mapped the experience and designed the prompts.
Our plan was to recruit parents and children (4–10) and provide them with a phone and a mount. We would then act as the conversational user interface (CUI) via a zoom call. As the users passed specific places we would prompt the users with questions based on the story we created.
To measure the impact on conversation and connection in the car, we planned on having the users drive the route without our intervention as a control and then drive it with our intervention so we could compare the two experiences.
What made this a unique experience to the car was the location based prompts the car afforded and the constraint on the driver and spatial orientation the car provides.
We aimed to answer 2 driving questions:
- Will a location based game using a CUI engage parents and kids together in the car?
- Does this game-based engagement lead to connection?
The Pivot
Due to unforeseen recruitment challenges around clearances to work with minors, we were forced to rethink our prototype at the 11th hour. We decided we would try to answer the same questions with an analogous group to parents and children — close friends or partners.
Due to the lost time, we had to move even faster. We used the weekend to build a ‘buck’ or simulation of a car ride, with foam core, video, zoom and a little magic. The Frankencar was born.
We built a prototype in which close friends and partners sit in a foam core car and engage in a game designed to foster connection while experiencing the unique aspects of being in a moving vehicle.
The Game: Answer Pittsburgh trivia related to the places you see out the window. Whoever gets the question right gets to ask their partner a personal question from a deck of questions.
Our design questions were similar but tailored slightly to this prototype:
- Will location based games using a CUI engage people (friends or couples, 18+) in cars?
- Does this game-based engagement lead to connection?
- Is asking a personal question and learning about your partner enough of a reward to enjoy the game?
To gain data as quickly as possible and iron out the experience, we began testing this prototype with MHCI students. We ran four tests, three with 2 passengers and one with 3 passengers.
Prototype 1b
To get more data, took our Frankencar to a busy park to run some users through it. Armed with cold water and popsicles, the team hauled all of our equipment up Flagstaff Hill and put our prototype to the test with the people of Pittsburgh.
Based on rapid learning from our tests with our MHCI students, we added a visual interface to this test officially making it a multi-modal prototype! Overall, we had positive reactions to the experience and had a blast executing it. More detailed findings to come.
That’s it for now. Sprint 2 updates coming soon!
