Retrospective and Looking Forward
With our spring semester drawing to a close, it seems apt to take sometime to reflect on what we have accomplished so far and what we are planning for our summer semester.
This semester has been a great learning experience for everyone, we have all developed new skills and approaches to design. From all the work we have done the major accomplishments we see include: identifying a use case for Zensors to pursue, defining coworking as a pilot project for the summer, and continued refinement of key interactions on the Zensors platform.
And the winner is Coworking 🎊 🎉
Over the past four months we conducted 20+ interviews, explored 11 potential market verticals, visited several facilities, and narrowed our market vertical to co-working. Mapping our research onto the market vertical criteria demonstrated that coworking check all the boxes for Zensors. Coworking emerged as a potential use case that aligns with Zensor’s value proposition and offer benefits to its user and they businesses they manage. As we worked to unpack the roles, processes, and goals of coworking we developed personas and experiences maps to synthesize key features and taskflows for the platform. These design artifacts were crucial in helping us identifying where to focus our upcoming design and development sprints in the summer.
Piloting Zensors
Additionally this semester, we built connections with a coworking space — Beauty Shoppe. Beauty Shoppe is a local working space currently with four locations in Pittsburgh, soon to be seven. We interviewed the operations director and community managers to understand their roles, responsibilities, and their data needs.
We found that as much as they want a system that can track space utilization and streamline member management, more compelling is a system that can automate key business functions. The MHCI team hopes this pilot program will help Zensors understand Beauty Shoppe’s goals and needs and craft an experience that improves and increases returns on their business. We want to use this opportunity to drive enhancements and product strategy for Zensors going forward.
Design Validation & Development
Along with pilot partnerships we are going to design and develop a MVP for Zensors to begin design validation testing. We want to be handoff several key features and flow designed, developed, and tested by the end of summer.
The three key flows for the platform include: (1) Profile on-boarding and user setup, (2) Query creation, (3) Accessing insights. This summer we want to gather qualitative insights and feedback on design concepts and components, from lower to higher fidelity prototypes, we propose arranging continued validation work to be done throughout the summer term. Methods we’ll likely employ include:
- Heuristic evaluation
- Think Alouds
- Interviews
- Interaction assessment (eye tracking, UI interaction)
As we solidfy our interactions, in parallel we are going to build an MVP platform to deploy with our pilot particpants in June. This we will continue to refine and improve over the summer till August!
As you can see we have an packed summer planned, we can’t wait to see where it takes us. Thanks for joining us through this journey so far, we will see ya’ll in a couple of weeks!
We want to give a shout out to faculty advisors for being a great source of support and guidance through out this project!
