Tinkering Lab — Website Redesign
It was just the starting of my pre-final year when our Design Studio was approached by the secretary of the Tinkering Lab IITR. He needed a new and efficient design for their website of Tinkering Lab.
What is Tinkering Lab?
It is a technical facility provided by the college, open to all students. It is equipped with high-end tech like 3D printers, laser etchers, 3D scanners, etc. Students working on projects which require 3d printed components or any high power tools are really benefited by this facility.
Problem
This facility was newly built and a new initiative by the college authorities towards equipping students with high end technology. Initially it was installed with small scale 3d printers and power tools, and had future plans of scaling to industrial level equipment for bigger projects which needed to be worked with greater precision. But for the starters lab authorities wanted to validate that lab is helpful and students are really using it and it won’t be exploited.
So the major task was to make students aware of this facility, educating them how to use the equipment and maintaining a record of all the projects to prevent exploitation and for making future budget prospects.
Process
Research
I conducted the interview of Tinkering Lab Secretary to get the detailed information about the functioning of lab.
As the working of lab was pre-defined by the administration, there was not much flexibility to make any changes to it. So, all the students will have to work accordingly. Hence, I decided to go for card sorting. I listed all the features (that I came up with, after the interview) on sticky notes, and I asked different students to sort those cards but beforehand I explained them about Tinkering Lab. Also I gave them some empty cards so if they want something else they can write it and put it in the stack.
This exercise helped me to validate if students understand the functioning of lab or not.
The major insight of this exercise was ‘How to use?’ feature for different equipments. Many students mentioned that it will be needed as they don’t know much about the machines.
Analyse
As students were required to get permission for using lab for any project and during night hours, these permissions were ‘design constraints’ that I had to keep in mind. So to design my solution around these constraints I decided to build user journey map around the possible scenarios of these constraints.
Ideate
After the insights drawn from the above analysis I worked upon the flow of the website.
Then I made some paper sketches for the low fidelity wireframes. And after that I started with final design of the website.
Final Design
Learning
Working with design constraints : I built the user journeys around the given constraints to get a solution around that.
No solution lasts forever, it needs to be optimised based on the past results : In the beginning, supervising authorities were approving requests through emails but then the number of requests boomed and it was getting hard to keep a track of it. Hence, now they need a separate platform to keep a track of all the requests.
Also the total number of projects after a year of launch was a lot more than anticipated by us. Hence the search for the projects page needs to be optimised.
Summing Up
It was my first project that I worked on from scratch to fully functioning website. Being from an engineering background, and having no formal knowledge of design this project helped me a lot to move ahead in my journey of design.
Thanks for giving it a read. It means a lot.
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!
