Finishing our MVP and jumping into design strategy

Weekly Update

This week we developed a mental model research plan, begin our conceptual design ideation session, and tied together the MVP for deployment. The mental model study is built help the team develop an understanding of user’s mental model to inform our approach to building a more intutitive experience that facilities the user’s ability to understand the technology, the system’s capabilities, and how they can use both to accomplish their goals. We want to implement the insights we gather in this study in designing an on-boarding experience and future design strategies for the Zensors team. The MVP is in the final stages of development, we built out all required screens for the pilot and are working with our clients on some additionally screen that will create a full demo. In the next few days, additional screens will be completed and we will have a basic end to end Zensors experience!

The main part of this post is going to cover the ideation session we had this week. The session was a way to frame our next sprint of design work and future design directions for our client to ontake past our engagement. Our session was built to help the team generate ideas that push past our current approach of the platform and create ideas that augments the value Zensors creates for its users.

Uncovering User’s Painpoints & Concerns

From our initial rounds of user testing session we started seeing a common set of issues and concerns arise from our interviewees. Participants highlighted concerns around privacy and suggested additional features to the system’s current capabilities. Additionally we noticed that some particpants here developing inconsistent mental models of how the techonology works and the way the cameras link with questions and how data was generated.

With this is mind, we created the mental model study mentioned above, futhermore we wanted this to be the basis of our future design work. We took the issues we uncovered in our testing session to define the areas our future design work, these areas include:

(1) Educating users about how the technology works

(2) Extending the value created by Zensors

(3) Addressing users’s privacy concerns

The Creative Matrix

We employed the creative matrix technique to ground our ideation within user needs, while also give us the room to think creatively. For this to work, we devised a matrix where one axis held our personas and the other axis held HMW statements to be the focus of our ideas. Each of the HMW statements addresses the issues we highlighted from the user testing sessions.

Turning Ideas into a Design Backlog

The team was able to generate great ideas from the session! Many of the ideas organically grouped together into valuable design ideas to purse. Some of the most common ideas that emerged include:

• Training video for first time customers to understand how the tech works
• Communities of Zensors customers to share how they have used the tech to improve there co-working spaces
• Point and click game for community managers to understand how the system labels data
• Training of documentation for operation managers to handle privacy concerns
• Subscribers can create personalized alerts for the status of things around the co-working space
• Zensors provides suggestions on best meeting times for subscribers

Moving forward we want to integrate the findings from our mental model study into ideas we are excited to build out further. The design concepts & strategy we build becomes a great backlog of design directions for our client to integrate into future iterations of the product.