Disclaimer: I was in Arizona this week for a school-sponsored trip for my minor and couldn’t make it to class. Instead of talking about my experience at DRES I’ll be talking about my previous experience with human-centered design and my thoughts on the videos and readings we’ve looked at so far.
Background
Coming into this class, I really didn’t know what to expect. I had some exposure to inspiration and ideation phases of the human-centered design process in another class but was interested to learn more about the implementation phase and to see how all these principles applied in a physical maker space. As I was going through the material on the methods for the inspiration phase, I was struck by how thorough the techniques were for digging deep to the root cause of any problem. Using the “Five Whys” seems like a great way to fully analyze the situation. I realized that this step was foundational in solving the true problem instead of a byproduct of the problem. Realizing this helped give me greater context for a similar class project I had worked on a year ago.
Learning from the Past
In a previous class, I worked on a team that was tasked with finding a solution that would improve the porta-potty user’s experience. We learned about the human-centered design process and then started by finding out more about the user experience. Instead of actually interviewing or going to use a porta-potty my team sent out a survey asking about the pain points in the porta-potty user experience. This lack of personal contact with our respondents inhibited us from using the “Five Whys” method to dig to the root of the problem. We ended up finding that smell was an issue and decided that a spring-loaded flap to seal off the opening would be a good solution. The final class assignment was to create a prototype of our product (shown below).
Takeaways
While it was great to go through the inspiration and ideation phases of the human-centered design, we did not go through multiple iterations of our product and were not forced to think about the viability of implementation. This led our group to create a solution that would have struggled as a workable solution outside of the classroom. In this class, I am excited to learn from my mistakes in my last group project. This semester, I plan to take a more critical approach to gather information from our user group, iterate multiple times on our product through quick 3D prototyping, and develop a product that has viable implementation prospects.
I am a Senior majoring in Finance with a minor in the Hoeft Technology & Management Program.
My Comments:
https://digitalmaking.web.illinois.edu/spring2019/week-2-reflection-2/#comment-17
https://digitalmaking.web.illinois.edu/spring2019/week-2-reflection/#comment-18
I commend your analysis of your previous design project. I was also in the same design class and I agree that our design process was flawed because we were not able to use an iterative process. However, slightly different from you group, my group was trying to re-design a common brick and mortar store. We went to the Champaign Mall and spoke with individuals to get their feedback on what they liked/disliked about shopping at a store vs. online. I do not think our data pool was large enough to be a good representation of the population. However, I agree that in person contact proved very helpful.