Ready to go broad again?
How we narrowed our focus and started the development phase.
The moment you’ve all been waiting for — after months of discovery research, synthesis, and ideation, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, people! Team Far Out has finally narrowed their project focus! I know you were all on the edge of your seats.
Last week on Team Far Out: Quick recap! Our last sprint consisted of identifying possible project directions, rapid ideation, and building storyboards to prepare for speed-dating. To rewatch this episode, click here.
Getting the most out of our storyboarding
We revisited our storyboards to re-evaluate the questions we wanted to answer. Our initial storyboards were largely process-focused, but what about how the users felt in these scenarios? What were the questions we really wanted to answer with our speed-dating exercises?
We went back to the drawing board (or is it storyboard) to refine and refocus. Our new storyboards put heavier emphasis on user emotions and our discussions questions were ready to guide our speed-dating exercises in the coming week. Luckily, we were able to get in contact with a number of NASA engineers to test with!
Turns out, we’re on the right path
Talking to our participants was an invaluable experience. While our storyboards and potential foci were based on collected and synthesized data, we realized that we had made a number of assumptions to fill in the gaps. Speed-dating helped us fill those gaps in.
It was awesome to hear that some of the problems we identified hit the nail on the head. After months of hard work, it was both motivating and reassuring to know that we were going down the right path. In terms of defining our final focus, these speed-dating sessions also helped us gauge which problem areas would have greater impact on the SLS engineers.
Finally ready to prototype!
Now that we narrowed, it was time to go broad again.
We did a round of Crazy 8’s to rapidly ideate possible ideas, discussed what we came up with, refined, and then discussed again.
We’re excited to be entering the development phase! From here on out, we’ll be doing a lot of prototyping, testing, and refining! Stay tuned.
We are 5 MHCI students at Carnegie Mellon University, currently working on our capstone project, where we work with NASA to help engineers understand being “done” in building the Space Launch System (SLS). We will be taking turns to write about our research activities and insights, design decisions and how we navigate through ambiguity in general.
If you like what you’re reading, feel free to share or clap 👏👏👏 so that others can see it too!
