UrbeXIndy Case Study Report

Case Study

VC5: Methods for Innovation

Kaitlyn Theide, Levi Hadley, Nick Smith, Ciera Eadler & Sarah Sorg

Introdu

uction

the team Kaitlyn Theide, Levi Hadley, Nick Smith, Ciera Eadler & Sarah Sorg

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the project

This project was a task in carrying out the methods of People–Centered design from start to finish.

In a group of five we began by brainstorming our common interests in topics, problems, themes, hobbies, and more. Through various exercises we whittled the list of common interests down to a few different areas and ultimately came to our subject that we worked with for the next eight weeks: urban exploration. Beginning by researching the current state of urban exploration in Indianapolis by reaching out to local explorers, we got a sense of the common practices amongst them and the shared problem areas many encounter. By mapping out these reoccurring problem areas and following them out to the core problem that lies underneath them all we identified the source of much of the contention that exists within the community of urban exploration and subsequently began diverging on potential ways to solve it. We resolved to design an urban exploration app called Urbex that teaches users urban exploration etiquette developed by seasoned explorers, uncover new places to explore and learn about the spots beforehand, chat with other explorers, and find stores in person or online with good urban exploration equipment. Âś This case study details the methods employed throughout this project used to analyze the events, people, culture, and environments entailed withing urban exploration to uncover insights into motivations, thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes for the stakeholders. Additionally, the methods used to synthesize the solution are detailed to reveal how the insights generated from the preliminary ethnographic techniques directed the creation of final product.

stumbling upon urban exploration 6

The project began by individually diverging on activities, places, ideas, things, and problems that we are personally interested in. Then as a team we laid out our interest areas and began to sort them, grouping similar interests and topic areas.

Afterwards, we chose the three main categories that our interests fell under and subsequently diverged on context areas within those categories. These context areas include the people involved, where they take place, how they take place, and why they take place. Giving context to these topics was necessary to make them more palpable as real–world things than can be designed for. From that diverge, another converge within our group took place and we selected three topic areas to evaluate for feasibility based upon decided criteria. After this process of diverging and converging several times over, our group came to our topic area: Exploring off grid locations.

Post-its for days

table of contents

Phase 1:

Sensing Current Conditions Phase 2: Understanding Behaviors and Experiences

Phase 3:

Frame the Challenge Phase 4:

Ideate Potential Solutions Phase 5:

Iterate and Revise Phase 6:

Implement

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Phase sensing current conditions

To begin, we developed a couple exploratory methods for collecting qualitative data about urban exploration.

One could be used for in–person interviewing sessions with urban explorers and the other for phone/video chats, but with the same intention: to discover the cultureof urban exploration. Afterwards, we interviewed one another about our own knowledge and experience of urban exploration. This was done to bring all our knowledge of urban exploration to the surface and reveal to our group members our personal relationship with the topic at hand.

Before moving into the phase of collecting data on the culture of urban exploration we contemplated making a survey for urban–explorers to complete to get a surface level understanding of the culture. After talking with our professor, however, we decided not to. We learned that it was much better to just focus on a small group of users and get deeper into their experience, motivations, difficulties, thoughts, feelings, etc. on urban exploration than to just skim the surface on a large group of people.

We then began conducting phone interviews with a couple self–identified urban explorers. In just a couple conversations new insights were already generated into the process, thoughts, feelings and motivations of these explorers. One specific insight that was particularly interesting was one participant’s use of a shared Google map plotting of many hot spots in the city that included notes and tips on each one. The original authors of this map hoped to share it with other urban explorers in an effort to create a constantly growing traveler’s guide of a city’s urban exploration landscape.

In all, we interviewed six different people with various backgrounds in urban exploration, each giving us similar pictures of the culture, but nuanced in their experiences.

After these were done, we developed methods to make sense of all the data that was collected.

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Phase understanding behaviors & experiences

With this data we began the process of designing concept maps to visually organize the information.

Our first attempts at doing so were quite rough and in– class critique revealed many areas for us to improve our concept maps. Each one of us took very different approaches in how we visually represented the data. In total, the context maps helped us to begin seeing relationships in the data. That is, relationships the data has with itself and relationships it has to things outside of urban exploration.

Another method we used to begin seeing the data differently, and specifically looking for trends, was an affinity diagramming, sense-making activity. We took the transcribed notes from the interviews, condensed them and rewrote them on Post-its, allowing us to break up the data and move it around. Firstly we organized the information categorically; tips, what to bring, memories, location, people, feelings and motivations sorted each piece of data. These categories organically came out as we noted what types of information the participants discussed. Another arrangement of the data during this activity allowed us to see the data organized across time, illustrating when the pieces of urban exploration are experienced at the beginning, middle and end of the process. In doing these activities we began to see data from the interviews in a different way and instantly inspired us to begin ideating.

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After class we took a little trip to a nearby abandoned factory that is a popular site for graffiti writers.

We felt that it was really necessary that we all experience some urban exploration and put ourselves in the users’ shoes. It was a really cool trip and we certainly felt what many of the users described feeling before, during and after the exploration trip. Unfortunately we got a watered down version of what many experience during a typical expedition, but it was enough for us to gain a deeper appreciation for our users’ thoughts and feelings about the topic.

With all this information and its context we each designed different user journey maps. Each of our maps were different and we each charted the journey in different ways. Some focusing on place, some focusing on action, and some focusing more on emotion. We plotted the events of a typical urban exploration, the thoughts and feelings of the explorer, and some direct quotes from our users corresponding to various stages of the journey.

These journey maps allowed us to visual in a concise way the typical expedition of an urban explorer, and draw from it more information about specifically when in the journey certain previously identified “pain points” occur for the user.

This was especially useful as we advanced into the next phase of identifying the core problem area for the users based upon the data we collected and analyzed.

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Phase frame the challenge

After creating these maps we began to diverge on all the problem areas in the urban exploration experience.

In this time of diverging we created a problem map to visualize the breadth of potential problems an explorer may run into, ranging from not having the right gear to getting injured. From this list we followed each little (or not so little) problem through a causal series of events to arrive to the ultimate problem that each one boils down to.

Each problem came down to essentially the same result: because of various issues, others can no longer explore the spot because it gets exposed.

Later we gave a presentation on all our research findings and concluded it with our problem statement: How might we prepare explorers in order to preserve the hidden culture of urban exploration?

Once we framed our problem area to be addressed we began ideating on ways to address it.

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How might we prepare explorers in order to

preserve the hidden culture of urban exploration?

Phase ideate potential solutions

Initially there seemed to be a bit of confusion as to what we were really setting out to design a solution for.

We first began looking at designing solutions for the pain points we identified in the current experience of urban exploration in our user journey maps. Something didn’t seem right here; It didn’t seem like solving for those pain points was going to help us design a solution for the problem statement we set. In order to get on the same page, we drew out some models of what our objective looks like. Doing so brought clarity and we all got on the same page in understanding exactly what we needed to be designing for: a way to transfer knowledge of urban exploration from expert explorers to novice ones. This, if done successfully, could accomplish the problem statement. This activity was quite beneficial in moving forward and designing an effective solution.

Afterwards, we conducted a phone interview with one of the previous participants who is a seasoned explorer.

We brought him up to date on all that we had learned and synthesized so far in the project from his and others’ input. The purpose of this interview was to get his input on ideas we had generated for potential solutions and to encourage him to conceive potential solutions that would transfer cultural knowledge of urban exploration from expert explorers to new explorers. This part of the interview wasn’t very fruitful. It’s much harder to get people to think creatively when they may not used to be thinking that way. Thus, from this particular interview we didn’t extract much in terms of potential solutions but we did get honest feedback on the feasibility of our ideas. As a group we learned from this that it may take more novel ways to prompt people to do creative thinking and not filter their ideas.

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Afterwards, we began diverging on potential solution models. This model was a simple visual of what the solution to the problem statement looks/ acts like. Our final solution: an app. This app could be used for novice and experienced explorers alike to exchange information about proper exploration, find new spots to explore, share their findings with each other, find proper gear and enrich their experience of urban exploration through gamification.

Phase iterate & revise

We each took a core feature of the app to begin wire framing potential interfaces for the respective parts.

Afterwards, we brought our work together to discuss what was working and what wasn’t in terms of UI/UX design and to begin converging on the best form of navigation within the app. One problem we ran into while wire framing was the question of when to expose the user to certain content. A large objective of this app is to ensure that people are exploring responsibly. It was proposed during our discussion that the novice user should have to review basic rules of urban exploration before gaining access to the map of spots for exploration. We ultimately set this discussion to the side, as our time constraint didn’t really allow us to pursue this further. If we had more time, it would have been useful to brainstorm ways in which we may tactfully limit a users’ access to certain content until they complete another part. We could have then done an evaluative exercise with a potential user to measure whether our solution was viable or if they may have other routes to try.

As we entered our final production stages, the team worked collectively around one computer to flesh out the main navigational UI features. We looked to other apps for inspiration and eventually settled upon an interface with a simple navigation bar on the bottom of the screen with the five primary features of the app. We decided to employ dark backgrounds and light text throughout the app to aid explorers as they may be using it at night while adventuring. A couple of us took the responsibility of taking the UI/UX design to highest fidelity while another member worked on the presentation and the other two of us worked on compiling this project case study.

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Phase implement, build & test

Urbex a mobile app for urban explorers

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The introduction slides take the user through a preview of the app’s main functions. Shown here are the slides to introduce the Gear Store and the Do’s & Don’ts sections.

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The Discover section shows the user new spots to explore and prepares them for exploring each location.

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Each location shows user submitted content to help each other get ready to explore that spot. The user can access through this screen the shop to purchase the appropriate gear.

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Users can communicate with one another through the chat feature. The screen on the other page shows a user sharing a spot they just found.

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This screen shows a user’s profile. The other screen shows the tips &tricks section with articles pertaining to exploring.

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results/ conclusion 48

With an aim of practicing the methods of people–centered design, this project enabled us to co–design with users to produce an effective solution for an underground culture needing to organize itself and communicate with its members in a nuanced way. Using various exploratory, envisioning, sense making and evaluative methods of collecting data we acquired a deeper understanding of this community, the peoples’ shared experiences and the underlying issues there within. Knowing this, we devised an appropriate solution with a select group of urban explorers with this direction in mind: How might we prepare explorers in order to preserve the hidden culture of urban exploration?

The result was a mobile application called Urbex that allows users to learn the do’s and don’ts of exploration, find new places to explore and prepare for them, chat with other members of the community and shop for necessary gear either online or in nearby stores. We learned through practice that designing is most powerful when the stakeholders in the project are empowered and guided to design the solution(s) themselves alongside the designer. This project demonstrates that increasing transparency between designer and stakeholders throughout the process increases the effectiveness of the outcome.

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Copyright 2016 Levi Hadley, Nick Smith, Kaitlyn Theide, Ciera Jones, Sarah Sorg