User Centred Design Report

I N T E R N A L C

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E User Centre Design

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2017

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Will Phipps Yuchen Luo Rylan Fraser

I Willy phippsy-boy

Yuchen Luo

Rylan Fraser

Bachelour of Industrial Design

Bachelour of Industrial Design

Bachelour of Industrial Design

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This Booklet will take you through a linear progression of the User Centred Desing Process and how we used it to create our products that attempt to harmoniously make the users eperience and life better.

Our goal for the overal design idea of this concept was to try and eliminate/resolve a conflict in the Socialisation and Entertainment area of the home through the use of a product or series of products. To Achieve this goal, we employed the user centered design process that is made up of three stages, Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation. Throughout this booklet we take a look at each of these stages and processes encompased within these steps that help create as well as redefine our idea and turn it into a fuctioning design.

INTRO TO INSPIRATION The first task of this stage was to research ideal homes and source images from different forms of media (magazines, TV programs, etc.) and extract 10 statement from four directions: People, Place, Practices and Product. These statement were the basis for the 10 questions for our cultural probe. The participant of the cultural probes were everyday people that don’t occupy the same residence as ourselves, so that we could get a broader understanding of the average persons home. These participants then followed the instructions that we gave to them to answer the cultural probe, the information collated from this provided us with imagery and insight into the ‘Real Home’.

From this we were able to contrast the ‘Ideal Home’ and ‘Real Home’ and extract the tensions that arise between the two in order to enable us to build a foundation for which a product can be designed to elevate this tension.

THE IDEAL HOME The Ideal Home represents what stylists and the media think a living space should look like.

These spaces are often portrayed as clean, perfectly stylized and make optimal use of the space provided.

We sourced imagery from different medium in order to analysis and better understand the concept of an ‘Ideal Home’.

CULTURAL PROBE When it comes to designing a product the needs of the consumer are the main aspects that come into focus, and in order to decipher these needs you need a method of research, that’s where a cultural probe comes into play. A cultural probe is a non-invasive method of conducting research, while still being able to look into the daily lives of consumers.

Our cultural probe was designed from statements that were based around the ‘Ideal Home’, we did this in order to gather an understanding in the differences between the ‘Ideal’ and ‘Real’ home to be able to find tensions to start to build a basis to design a product that would make the Socialisation and Entertainment area of the home more enjoyable and consumer friendly.

RESEARCH FINDINGS Once we had broken down and analyzed the data from each of the cultural probes we found the following statements to be recurring themes

• MOST REAL HOMES HAVE COFFEE TABLES AND OR DINING TABLES THAT ARE MESSY AND GENERALLY COVERED WITH PAPERS, MAGAZINES, ENTERTAINMENTS DEVICES ETC.…

• SOCIALISATION AND ENTERTAINMENT ISN’T ALWAYS CENTRED AROUND A TABLE, MOST OF THE TIME IT IS DONE ON COUCHES OR CHAIRS • MOST HOUSES ARE CLEAN AND MODERN (IDEAL HOMES) BUT IN REAL HOMES, PEOPLE ADD THEIR PERSONALITY AND STYLE • IN MOST HOMES, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIALISATION IS A MULTI-LEVEL ACTIVITY (I.E. WATCHING TV WHILST SCROLLING ON YOUR PHONE • IN MOST IDEAL HOMES ENTERTAINMENT IS CENTRALISED AROUND AN ENTERTAINMENT DEVICE BUT IN REAL HOMES ENTERTAINMENT ISN’T LIMITED TO THIS FORM, RATHER ITS IN MULTIPLE FORMS (I.E BOOKS, MAGAZINES, T.V, PHONES, CONSOLES, ECT ECT)

COMPARATIVE

ANALYSIS The purpose of this step was to compile all the information received from the Ideal Home research as well as the Cultural Probe and transfer that data into five statements that reflected our findings. Those statements would help identify tensions between the ideal home, the real home and the difficulties that the users meet when striving to achieve the same ‘Ideal Home’ goals as shown in the media. This step allowed us to recognize problems and help frame them into opportunities that can potentially combat a vast array of issues that exist in the ‘Real Home’

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T I D E A T I O N The second stage to the User Centred Design process is the ‘Ideation stage’. Here we explored all the data and information found during the ‘Inspiration Stage’ and translated it into concepts that will help us to improve our user-collaborator’s experience. Through the Ideation process, we continued to refine and develop our concepts through drawing, prototypes and user collaboration. initially our group met up to discuss what our research findings had produced and to isolate the largest reocuring themes of discontent in the user’s homes. What we found was that our collaborators wanted to be able to remove some of the human element from their socializing and entertaining spaces. They also wanted effective ways to store and tidy their things such as magazines and electric devices among other items that distract from socialisations and entertainment. With this information, we set out to design several concepts that intend to make the user-collaborator’s socialising and entertainment spaces more functional and aesthetically pleasing.

DESIGN CONCEPTS From the concepts produced by each group member we were able to collaboratively examine one another’s ideas and pass comments on aspects that we liked or didn’t like in the designs. This stage of the Ideation process was about getting our ideas from pen to paper in order to have visual references for what we wanted to produce as well as to further develop the ideas that we had in our heads.

PROTOTYPING & USER COLLABORATION In this stage of the Ideation process we sat down collectivally and picked out the three best design ideas (one from each group member) from our concept stage and discussed what areas we wanted to see improved/changed in each of these.

After this group discussion we individualy started on refining our ideas in order to have a design that could be transformed into a scale prototype. Why would we create prototypes of these designs? Well it enabled us to go back to our collaborators with a physical replica of the design idea to enable them to gain a better understanding of what were trying to create.

From this time with our collaborators we were able to extract what they thought were good and bad aspects of the design as well as information on how they would change it to better suit the user. Lastly, armed with the collaborators information and ideas we were able to create a further refined prototype, one that used their ideas to further better our products in order to create a better user experience.

PROTOTYPE REFINEMENT

For the last part of the Ideation stage we made a further refined prototype. This prototype was ma with the input and feedback from the collaborators after the discussions from the previous prototype We completed this step to further the design as well as to make it more user friendly while eliminati conflicts in the socialisation and entertainment space.

IMPLEMENTA-

For this final segment of the User Centred Design process, The Implementation stage, we carried over all of what we had learnt from the previous two stages through our research, designs, prototypes and user collabortion. The Inspiration and Ideation stages channel into the final design concepts for our products collectively and produce functioning prototypes that communicate with our collaborators and target audience.

The Implementation segment required us to act on the direction that our projects have taken in the ideation stage and use further information from market research, fellow designs and collaborators to complete the final design/ experience. It is in this overal experience that we are trying to create that our projects attempt to tackle the issues that we have found in the current ordinary home.

S.W.I.F.T. ANALYSIS

After meeting up with our collaborators and discussing our products with them in depth we were able to get them to complete a SWIFT analysis. From this feedback we were able alleviate some possible problems surrounding the overall design of the products that the collaboraters picted up on, as well as explain some features of the products where the collaborator might have thought there was a weakness when it was simply it was a miss-understand of the functionality of the design. From this feedback the final transformation of our product was able to be completed.

USER TESTING Our user testing enabled us to see that our collaborators were quite impressed with our design idea and functionality of the experience that our artefacts created together. They did point out some pros and cons in the design (which can been seen in the SWIFT analysis) which helped us to refine our overall design so that it was market ready, as well as being as user friendly as possible.

SECONDARY R E S E A R C H The secondary research stage involved each member of team individually researching their idea/design to see if there was anything similar to it already on the market. This stage enabled us to gain knowledge about what products we might stand up against when it comes time to sell our product to the consumer, as well as to help us further distance our products from possible already existing ones to make sure they stand out amongst the crowd.

From our research we each individually found that our products weren’t similar to anything on the market, and although there might have been some products that came close to what we had designed, they still weren’t on pair with what we had come up with.

FINALISED PROTOTYPES

One of the last parts of this Implementation stages was to create a finalised protoype that showcased the functionality of our designs, as well as how they worked harmoneously together to eliminate mess, culter and reduce wasted space in the Socialisation and Entertainment area.

FUNCTIONALITY VIDEO In order to show the functionality of our products and how they work together to create an ‘Internal Escape’ we produced a video with our scale protoypes and a functioning scale figure to help illustrate thse points to the consumer in an easy and short way.

INTERNAL ESCAPE SUMMARY Through the use of the User Centred Design process we have been able to create, design, refine, prototype, test and finalise our design idea.

The three steps of Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation have enabled us to break down our design idea into smaller more managaeble stages, as well as produced us more opportunities to refine our product with the use of user collaboration in an effort to help create a more user friendly product.