Baguettes & Breakthroughs: Deriving Insights to Develop Prototypes
Coming out the end of our sprint, we’re feeling more confident and optimistic with our project direction. While we’re encountered many highs & lows, twists & turns, we’re ready to couple our research with prototype building and experimenting.
Recently, the team travelled to Mill 19 for ARM’s Sanding & Grinding Workshop, where they hosted several sessions and networking opportunities for around 100 manufacturers, engineers, and vendors within & without ARM’s consortium. Their talks included an overview of services from ARM and their frequent partner Catalyst Connections, ways of taking the risk out of manufacturing facilities with advanced technologies, and the best way to go about implementing robots into a factory. This gave us a unique opportunity to observe, learn, and talk to the participating individuals. These conversations allowed us to better grasp ARM’s ecosystem, value flow, and even make connections with a local manufacturer we plan on visiting! Some of our key insights include:
- Most manufacturers, while are hesitant about adopting technologies into their facilities, have a have a sink or swim mindset and thus feel its necessary to implement in order to stay competitive in this market
- Most manufacturers agree that robots don’t take away jobs from operators, and instead create more
- With operators being the main user who directly interact with any new technology that is implemented on a daily basis, it is important that they consider its usability and comfortableness to ensure they are content utilizing them
- Operators may try to sabotage the new technology / robots they are using out of fear of job replacement
- Many operators’ primary language is Spanish, and thus it is important to design these systems in a way that limits text and provides a clear workflow
These above learnings drove our team to victory when we pitched a recommendation for a capstone class activity. Almost every week, our director has each team pitch ideas and / or prototype during the first half of class, with the prize being a highly sought after baguette from a local bakery. This time, we presented a slide with a recommendation for a skeptical executive using the Pyramid Principle — backing up our recommendation with supporting statements and evidence. Going last with only 30 seconds to convince our client (which was originally 2 minutes), Justine pitched a recommendation that secured the baguette, being along the lines of:
“Currently, when ARM consults with a manufacturer on a project to integrate new technology into the factories, they only really interact with the facility managers and engineers. However, they often don’t consider the operators who are the primary users of the machines. Through interviews with manufacturers, we’re learned that oftentimes operators sabotage machinery out of fear for job replacement. Therefore, we recommend that ARM conduct field studies to be more inclusive of operators in their integration process and co-creation of value.”
While we knew that we needed to talk to operators to best understand their perspectives first hand, and are in the process of scheduling meetings through our connections, we still felt a sense of confusion as to how we break down and go forward with all of the knowledge we have gathered up until this point. To understand ARM’s consultation process a whole and connect it to insights we derived from the parties outside of ARM’s team, during our next client sync, we asked ARM to walk us through their end to end process. There we asked clarifying questions that identified their biggest pain points and challenges, how cases vary, and where we could potentially incorporate solutions within these stages. From their comments, we collectively felt a sense of clarity and and developed How Might We statements that addressed their greatest overarching problem: bridging the knowledge gap of the manufacturer’s familiarity of robots.
This included, HMW:
- shorten the implementation process?
- enable efficient onboarding procedure?
- keep our solution safe and sustainable?
- motivate manufacturers to learn?
- make our solution more accessible off-site / more portable?
- change the mindset of operators?
These guided our ideas for the different prototypes we could generate, varying in levels of technological advancement and challenges it could potentially solve. Moving to this phase will allow us to verify our research findings, gage the client’s expectations, and get a better grasp of our project direction by proposing a variety of solutions.
We ended off our sprint strong with a long waited team bonding session where we enjoyed sushi, boba, and each other’s good company!
We’re sharing our Capstone journey to give you a sneak peek into what the MHCI Capstone experience is really like. It’s our way of offering an insider’s perspective on the path to breaking into the UX field. Whether you’re a fellow student, a seasoned professional, or just someone curious about the world of human-computer interaction, we want to invite you to join us on this rollercoaster of creativity and problem-solving. Follow us for regular updates, and if you’ve got thoughts, questions, or just want to chat about UX, we’re all ears!
Note: This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
