Giving Form to our Research
The numo capstone team starts creating storyboards, prototypes and personas that bring form to the insights they got from their research.
Welcome back!
If you’ve been following the numo MHCI capstone team on Medium, you must have seen how our last sprint was packed with a lot of insight-generating activities like affinity diagramming and visualization of survey response data. We ended sprint 4 by pivoting from our original plan of refining and testing conceptual prototypes to using crazy 8s to rapidly ideate and create storyboards.
Riding this momentum of rapid creation, we marched into sprint 5 with the goal of challenging ourselves to think creatively in terms of both the ideas we come up with and maintaining the same level of productivity that we had prior to the changes caused by COVID-19. In this post, we show you some more storyboard ideas for both merchants and consumers, ideas that resonated the most with our interviewees during speed dating, personas generated based on the research so far and next steps for the rest of the semester.
Speed Dating: First Iteration
Speed dating in user-centered research, much like the social event itself, is used to quickly test out several ideas. The storyboards we created in sprint 4 were ideas for both customers and merchants. The team recruited speed dating participants by reaching out to personal connections and by posting in relevant groups on social media platforms. Each speed dating session with a participant spanned 30–45 minutes. Here are some storyboards that were the popular choices among the participants-
Customer Storyboards
By analyzing the findings from our customer research, we noticed that people want cashbacks to fit into their lifestyles. Another important finding was that people’s interpretation of saving money included keeping track of their money regularly using budgeting apps. We combined these two insights to create a storyboard idea where people can use an app to track their spendings and this spending data will be used to create tailored offers. The speed dating participants gave a unanimously positive response to this idea.
Another storyboard that was a crowd favourite was based on the insight we got from our customer affinity diagram- Deals are viewed as a way to manipulate spending rather than saving money. In this storyboard, we suggest a way to provide cashback offers to users for purchases they make naturally. Our speed dating participants also liked the fact that the whole process is streamlined and does not require extra effort on their end.
Merchant Storyboard
From the merchant storyboards, business owners who participated in speed dating liked this idea the most. This storyboard is grounded in the need to support and promote local businesses. The merchant participants in our speed dating sessions thought cashbacks can be a good way to get new customers to check out their store. Once they get a foot in the door, they have a chance to make the customer loyal by providing them good service and quality products.
Conceptual Prototypes: Second Iteration
We created some conceptual prototypes in the last sprint. For this sprint, we decided to iterate and create prototypes for more out-of-the-box ideas. Using Crazy 8s, each team member came up with new ideas for both merchants and consumers. The team voted the top 5 ideas for customers and created new storyboards and prototypes for them.
Currently, the team is conducting speed dating sessions with customers to get feedback on the newly generated storyboards and prototypes.
Personas
In the past three months, we interviewed more than 40 consumers, either during Guerrilla Research or Think-Aloud sessions. We learned a lot from them and we know these findings will keep benefiting us in the future. To better guide our future designs, we decided to create personas according to the profiles of our interviewees. We started by listing all the attributes that represent our interviewees, such as whether or not they are using technology to save money, their preference for credit or debit cards, etc. Then for each interviewee, we entered the values of all those attributes. Finally, we linked similar attribute values to find patterns among all the interviews. Using these patterns, we created the following three personas.
As we move forward in our research, we plan to use these personas to guide our work. Also, as we pull out new insights from our research, we plan to keep updating these personas to help them stay relevant.
Final Deliverables for Spring Semester
Time flies! Our spring semester is coming to an end. In the past few months, we learned a lot from both consumers and merchants. We found many unmet needs, both implicit and explicit, and are eager to solve these problems with our design. Before we move on to the design phase, we want to conclude our research and deliver our achievements in three forms: a presentation deck, a research report, and a responsive website.
Client Presentation
We will be giving a presentation to our client and faculty at the end of April. With this deck, we want to present the exciting findings and insights from our research to our clients. Also, we want to collaborate with them to figure out the most promising directions that we can move towards during the design phase in the summer semester.
Research Report
We will document our detailed research process in this report. It will include all the research methods we have applied, our findings, and the insights generated during the research. This report will also include the plan for the next steps to be taken in summer.
Responsive Website
For anyone interested in our project, we want to show our achievements through this website. It will illustrate how we stepped through all the barriers during the process and got to where we are now. This website will be designed in a manner that makes it easy for people who are not designers or researchers to understand our work.
What’s next?
We have only one more sprint left in this semester! In these last two weeks, we will create prototypes for merchants’ use, and keep iterating on the prototypes according to the feedback we get from speed dating. At the same time, we will keep working on the semester deliverables. Stay tuned for more updates!
