Are We New Yorkers Yet?
Week 3 in review
Even working on a project for just three short weeks presents the risk of falling into familiar, limiting creative routines. Many of the ideas that Dory and I have been working on have gone through the same cycle: a quick individual sketch, followed by a collaborative prototype. Then, we’ll move onto another idea and come back to it after getting feedback from the studio. Our challenge has been how to get more out of an idea, and how to judge what needs to be taken further.
Early in the week, Adam suggested a slightly different approach to sketching. He encouraged us to sketch on printer paper rather than in our notebooks, so that we would be able to tape our sketches on the wall. Having the sketches more visible resulted in them being more available, more shareable, and more readily developable.
Many of our sketches this week were done in cafés around the area (are we New Yorkers yet?!) as we recognize that environment is invaluable to productive thought. We’re particularly fond of Local Café on Sullivan, especially since they have a no laptop policy.
These sketch sessions didn’t just refresh our respective creative processes, they bonded them. This was necessary because Dory and I admittedly exhibit some characteristic symptoms of a designer/developer duo (see Dory’s blog post).
On Wednesday, we had the chance to share our sketches with the studio. This time around, we felt that the work that came out of sketches and feedback was ready to go a step further. We prepared to take our ideas out of our studio comfort zone and into the user’s world in the form of street intercepts.
Street intercepts— which are exactly what the name suggests— are a good way to understand what is important to the user. In our case, we were less concerned with what features users might expect from our product ideas, and more concerned with whether the products were something people even cared about at all.
We went about our intercepts in Washington Square Park (lots of approachable people with a lot to say) and in Union Square Park (not exactly the most pleasant crowd). Our intent was to find out more about people’s regular music listening habits: did they find mobile music control (i.e. volume functionality, music selection) intuitive? We prepared basic questions and some paper prototypes in order to start the conversations.
After Thursday’s street intercepts, we noticed a problem people were identifying that we hadn’t yet thought to address. It turned out that what our respondents wanted to talk about was playlist creation and use. Many said that they liked the idea of the playlist— our working definition being an organized collection of an individual’s music— but were simply too lazy or uninterested to create them.
We came back to the studio and worked with this a bit, then spent Friday afternoon doing more intercepts (after hearing Anthony Casalena, Founder and CEO of Squarespace, speak in a very rainy DUMBO that morning). Our goal is to continue doing intercepts this week with a slightly new focus each time.
We’re feeling enthusiastic about how this particular idea is evolving, but we do have some hesitations about entering the saturated world of music applications. If you have any thoughts about your own music listening habits, we’d love to hear them as we further consider this problem space!
