Venture is a project a good friend Sahith Cheera and I developed for a course in User Centered Design. Sahith was an international student from India and I had just come back from a year abroad. Through these differences in cultural understanding and perspective, we shared our learning experiences with traveling and our adjustments toward a new respective city. Through this discourse we wanted to develop a solution to common traveler dilemmas, such as finding fun things to do, getting around, and making friends. Our goal was to provide this "direction" to one's sense of adventure by providing people with predetermined routes from requested locations or interest, but also provide a unique and social adventure to follow.
My Role
I lead the overall design work and product management from the initial conception in September 2015. I expanded an idea to a marketable solution leaving traces of my mind in everything from the user research, interaction hierarchy, and overall design.
Digging Deep
I collaborated with my partner Sahith to dig deep and utilize our experienced difficulties to drive the initial inspiration and features of our project. I conducted further brainstorming sprints that helped with cementing a foundation for further iterations as new research and information became available.
Research and Analysis
I conducted both primary and secondary research around travel and concepts of culture shock, and motives for tourism. After creating a design build for our application, Venture received a grant from the University of Washington CoMotion NSF I-Corp to further explore our customer base. Through this grant my partner Sahith and I, revisited our research and traveled to San Francisco conducting series of interviews, surveys, and observational studies to better understand our customers, users, and stakeholders.
Setting the Scope
I established the boundaries of the project through assessment of goals and time. This project was time sensitive with hard due dates as defined by our course instructor.
Diplomatic Leadership
I believe that great ideas evolve from collaboration and so I lead through courageous vulnerability; openly displaying my ideas for critique and challenge. I worked to provide transparency of both the expectations and the holistic goals through proactive communicative with my team.
Design Execution and Validation
I utilized a structured design model to guide the organization and flow of this project. I designed using a modified top-down system to design in a series of smaller pieces that would later influence further process of the design and overall product. I modified this top-down system to account for new discovery and information acquired through iterations.
The Approach
I used a Goal-Directed Design Model introduced by in Alan Cooper's About Face. The methodology compartmentalizes the design and the product through systems of achievable goals and so this was a great way to implement both agile and waterfall type product management style.
Alan Cooper's Goal-Directed Design Model from About Face helped define project progression
Personas are Key
Ventured started with research and understanding the users and where their problems lie. Alan Cooper explains that the essence of this Goal-Directed Design process is to "find a person, understand their vision and their final desired end state, and then make them ecstatically happy about reaching their end state... and what you need are two things: 1) Find (or synthesize) the right person and 2) Design for that person." Therefore we conceived two individuals based on our research that would would be fundamental users for our application. Through setting their scenario, characteristics, technology-constraints, goals, pain points, and overall aspirations we could better EMPATHIZE with our users and accurately "design for that person".
Design through Storytelling
Our goal through creating our story boards were to deepen our perspective of our personas. I created three scenarios for our personas to portray a "day in the life" of our users. Part one of our goals were to understand a particular situation and with it the pain points, goals, and desire. I wanted to understand if we achieved a goal, if we limited a pain point, and considered the constraints we previously outlined. Part two of our goals for designing these storyboards was to start the outline, the site-mapping, and interaction hierarchy for our application. We had to start solidifying the set of user interfaces that a user would encounter when they decide to use our application.
Setting the Scope
One of the biggest challenge encountering this project was managing the features that this application could do. The brainstorming sessions were often wild and it was nice to have the freedom to really conjure up a product without thinking about implementation, but the cost came in managing all the ideas. We had FOCUS our ideas ideas, simply because it didn't fit the schedule, or required too many variables. I don’t like to think that these ideas were completely ruled out, but definitely put on back burner for our sanity, progression, and ability to meet the required deadlines.
Rock the Mock
Our sitemaps provided traction for furthering our basic mock-ups and foundation for the aesthetic design of our user interfaces. Through our Annotated Wireframes we were able track all the features, each placed element's function, and the segue from screen to the next within our application. Through this process I found the collective nature that is UI design: Interaction Design, Visual Design, and Information Architecture.
Feeding on Feedback
Our open feedback sessions from other designers in our course gave us amazing insights for the final mock-ups of and demo of our project. We found confidence in our idea but we also gained a better sense of direction. We had a ton of features that we thought about and wanted to include however our audience let us know the features that really mattered. For our final high-fidelity mock-ups and demo we added filters to serve as the main mechanic for managing some of the features previously kept on hiatus. Integration of bike and Uber options was an interesting piece of feedback we decided could try and incorporate, while the features of wheelchair accessibility really opened my eyes as to those with disabilities. As a designer I felt I really ought to concern myself with these users in mind, and so we could have totally missed this important aspect had we not had great colleges to remind us of these perspectives.
High Fidelity Mockups (Proto.io)
Reflection
Throughout this entire experience I feel I got an interesting perspective on design through a goal-oriented process but I also had a lot of fun working and designing this idea.
In the start of 2016, Venture received a NSF grant to study customer development and better understand the entrepreneur perspective of user-centered design and product development. We had the unique opportunity to visit San Francisco and study travelers, tourists, and vacationers.