Project 3: design sprint

Goal

The goal of P3 is to help abandon two common errors that new designers make. Error 1: focusing on raw description in needfinding, and then designing to patch surface-level problems. Error 2: going too deep when prototyping.

Project 3 also initializes our experiences with the studio theme. We'll be continuing this with P4, the final project.

Brief

Find a partner in your studio: P3 will be completed in groups of two.

Your goal is to perform needfinding within the domain of your studio, use those insights to generate a number of design ideas, and then rapidly prototype and evaluate those ideas. We are doing a focused pass through the user-centered design process in two weeks. This brisk pace is intentional: it forces us to make tradeoffs in our prototypes and focus on the most important elements, rather than trying to implement everything.

Part I

due monday february 2 @ 11:59am

Your assignment for Part I is to perform needfinding and use the insights to generate design ideas.

Needfinding

Your teaching team has introduced you to the studio's theme and given you ideas for possible needfinding opportunities. Now, think about locations and people that could lend you insight into the theme. Your first goal is to perform needfinding and synthesize your observations into a set of needs and insights.

With this assignment, move beyond simple descriptions of the environment and dig into new perspectives. A common concern with P1 submissions was that the observations were far too surface-level. This time, the expectations are higher. In addition, take care to avoid Stanford-world problems. Stanford-world problems are issues that are overly focused on a student worldview, or too focused on Silicon Valley stereotype behavior. If you're studying play, for example, don't go do your needfinding at a campus party, or design apps that help you and your friends get together in the evenings.

Your needfinding will occur in three steps: prepare, observe, and analyze.

Prepare

Look past the people and environments that are readily accessible: focus on opportunities that will teach us something. For example, if you're studying health, Vaden is nearby but doesn't give you new perspectives, so avoid it. To help your selection, identify relevant stakeholders — people directly involved or implicated in the activity. For example, if you are interested in elder care, potential stakeholders include the elderly being cared for, family members, and health care professionals.

Next, put together a discussion guide of questions and topics to cover when you go out on your interviews. The Asking Questions section in this week's reading should help.

Each studio instructor has offered some suggested needfinding venues:

• Mapping and Navigation: in this Google Doc
• Health:
  • Nursing home
  • ER waiting room
  • Meet up group related to specific health issue (TONS of options here)
  • If you know someone in a wheel chair or with a specific health condition, ask to shadow them for a few hours
  • Interview working parents with young kids in daycare and find out how they manage kids' illnesses
• Data Narratives:
  • Tourists taking photographs: what will they do with them? how will they share them?
  • How do people with young families store data or photographs related to their children?
  • How do people who have a wide variety of professional collaborations manage data with their collaborators?
  • What extreme cases - through variety, quantity or heterogeneousness - of data use can you find, and what can they tell us about more mundane uses?
  • Nobody you talk to should be a Stanford student or one of your family members.
• Deepening Social Ties: Visit and interview any place associated with tailoring Valentine’s gifts. The trick is getting beyond the clichés, perhaps by interviewing people who personalize gifts of attention (e.g., concierge, florist, personal shopper, event planner)
• Serendipity: in this Google Doc
• Leveling the Playing Field:
  • Any regular bus stop
  • Greyhound bus station
  • Soup kitchen
  • Homeless people on the street
  • Park with children and caretakers
  • Park with elderly people
  • Day laborers at street corner

Observe

Go and begin your observation and interviews. Pay attention to the distinct stakeholders and the settings, people and things that engage them. What works and what does not? Observe and talk with everyone you can! What are the practices and goals of the various participants? How are they different? How are they similar? How do they succeed or fail? Can you find and observe any extreme users who can provide deeper design insight?

Capture the conversations, behaviors, and the environment in your sketchbook. These are your observations. Focus on specific stories and details. If you don't do this, it will be much harder to have the depth that you need for your later supporting evidence. You won’t know until later that something is important, so record everything you can: notes, audio, video, and more. There's lots to record, so don't spend time synthesizing yet.

Analyze

After you're done, synthesize these raw materials into interpretations. Make sure you call out needs. If you need a reminder of these terms and methods, check this week's lecture and reading, or look at the d.school Bootcamp Bootleg.

The method we recommend: put your observations on stickies and organize, reorganize, and reorganize them. Keep discussing what you've found, what patterns are in the data, contradictions, things that people say are fine but are clearly too cumbersome, and so on. Set aside a large block of time to do this. It cannot be rushed. It often takes longer than the interviews themselves because you are working to pull out all the nuggets.

Your report should contain a combination of text, images, sketches, and potentially other media. Work to produce a number of How Might We...?" questions (see also this week's lecture) that can inspire specific brainstorms. Do not submit a raw dump of materials; rather, organize a subset of your most salient, insightful or inspiring observations and interpretations. In practice, having good observations and insights is just half the bill. Being able to communicate them effectively in an emotionally appealing and data-driven manner is another very important aspect of being a designer or a UX researcher.

In particular, back up each interpretation and need with: 1) an observation, a quote or a picture; and 2) a "How Might We...?" question that you can use while brainstorming.

Flare: brainstorm

Now it's time to synthesize your needfinding results into design concepts.Work with your partner to brainstorm together on whiteboards, sketchbooks, artisinal cheese scraps — whatever it takes.

Start with your "How Might We..." questions that ground your brainstorm with actionable problems. Sketch out enough ideas until you find a set that you’re inspired to explore further. It should be at least 15 ideas, and probably many more. This brainstorm should be wild and broad. Use the brainstorming techniques from class. Again, focus not on usability patches, but deeper design innovations.

Once you hit saturation — and this may take multiple brainstorms — capture your ideas to share them with us. Sketch out those ideas clearly for the staff the read and understand. You can use a combination of media if it's helpful.

Focus: elaborate

Select ideas that you would like to pursue — we suggest two — and expand on them a bit further. Tell us: what are the goals of the design? For example, Google's Android design goals are: delight me in surprising ways, simplify my life, and make me amazing (e.g., grant me special powers). Which aspects of your design reflect each goal? Sketch out the broader interaction context of how you imagine these ideas being used. Include who the users are, the major needs those users bring to the situation, and how your design solution addresses the needs.

Now that you've identified some design directions you like, it's time to change tack and toss in a dark horse idea. A dark horse, in horse racing, is a contender who most people don't think will win, but may turn in an unexpectedly strong performance and produce a huge payoff. Dark horse ideas are intended to be something far out there or nearly impossible. In the best case, your dark horse ideas might end up winning the race. However, even in the worst case, they can give us tremendous design insight and prevent design fixation, where the design space shrinks too rapidly.

There are three requirements for dark horse ideas. First, they must be "dark": they must explore a space that is risky, radical, infeasible, and/or in a direction orthogonal to previously explored solutions. They should feel slightly uncomfortable. Second, they must be brainstormed after the more traditional ideas — you can't have a dark path without a traditional "light" path to contrast it against. Third, they must be refined enough that they could be prototyped and objectively tested. That is, it cannot be infeasible: it needs to be something that we could put in front of real people to see whether it would work.

If you have dark horse ideas that came up in your initial brainstorm, you can use that. If you're not satisfied, brainstorm some! Try using Powers of Ten and other techniques to push further and generate even more. After you brainstorm and sketch out dark horse ideas, choose one that you'd like to include among your set of two top candidates from before. Expand on your dark horse idea like you did for the previous top two ideas.

Prepare for studio

You will have four minutes to present your needfinding results and your three ideas in studio.

Submit

Pull everything together into your P3 submission folder. That includes:

• One PDF that contains your needfinding report, including your discussion guide, your observations, your interpretations and needs, and your "How Might We...?" questions.
• One PDF that contains your brainstormed idea sketches, and your further explorations of two top ideas.
• One PDF that contains your brainstormed dark horse ideas, and your further exploration of one of them.

Grading rubric

Part II

due monday february 9 @ 11:59am

Your assignment for Part II is to iterate your designs based on the critique you received in studio, and then create rapid prototypes of the ideas for user feedback.

Revisions and brainstorms

Based on your feedback in studio and in writing, refresh and update your design ideas. Based on the feedback, you may want to toss out your previous designs and brainstorm new ones, or refine your original proposals.

The in-person and written critique is intended to help you reflect on your needfinding and your designs. Trampoline off of it to refine or pivot. Remember, critiques aren't intended to just give you usability feedback; they aim to question deeper aspects of your design. If you think you can address the feedback with a different solution than the one the instructor or your peers suggested, go for it. However, it is your responsibility to address the critique with your revision.

Your end goal will be to choose three designs, one of which is a dark horse, to prototype in the next step. Capture the current designs in sketches, and include a short writeup to detail the changes you made and explain your thinking behind those changes. The writeup should be at least a paragraph per design to fully explain the reflections and iteration you've done.

Three prototypes

Much like Horcruxes, one should not place all their faith in a single prototype. As we've discussed in class, having multiple parallel prototypes produces better final designs.

Your goal now is to prototype all three of your design ideas. Too often, designers and engineers get deeply invested in taking a week or a month or multiple months to produce a single prototype, only to find that it doesn't address the user needs. The explicit goal of this assignment is to challenge ourselves to generate convincing but rapid prototypes.

Prototypes are, by nature, incomplete and low-res. As the d.school bootleg says, your goal is not to create a mockup or scale model, but to create experiences to which your users can react.

The crux of this assignment will be figuring out how to prototype each idea quickly and convincingly, without sinking untold hours into them. If you spend too much time creating prototypes, you won't have time to do rapid user testing at the end of the assignment. Forcing ourselves to make tradeoffs is the entire reason that the time limit on this deliverable is one week. Don’t just start building a prototype — you won’t know what you should be prototyping and at what level of fidelity to get your question answered.

Instead, before you start the prototype, explicitly make a list of the questions that you have about your idea and the hypotheses you have about the answer to each question. Remember that each prototype asks a question. So, what's your design ideas's biggest unanswered question? Once you've decided on the question, figure out what kind of prototype you would need to build and how you would get feedback from users to answer it.

For example, when IDEO and Kodak were prototyping the first digital camera, their question was not about how people would take photos, or about how long the battery would last. It was about what the back-of-screen interaction might feel like. So, they made quick facsimile hardware that was much too large, just so they could test the back-of-screen interaction:

Based on the questions, decide upon the best method of prototyping it. By now, you have a wide range of prototyping approaches in your arsenal. Prototypes can be hand-drawn, constructed physically, behavioral, or digital. Your skillset also includes Wizard of Oz prototypes, paper prototypes, video prototypes, and mocks. Which approach or toolkit will best represent each idea? The choice is yours here — and it need not be digital unless that is the best way to answer your question. (Reminder from CS 147: often, it's not digital.)

Capture your questions and prototypes so that we can understand what you did. Include relevant materials (e.g., images, videos) and a short description.

Rapid feedback

It's about time that we actually engaged with users, isn't it? Remember that testing many can produce better insights than testing one. So, bring your three prototypes to real people. Work with as many as you need to cover the feedback you need, typically somewhere around four users. If you have easy access to representative users for your designs, work with them. Otherwise, get as close as you can using the social capital you have at hand. Ask your studio staff if you need help.

Set the stage — the user's problem or goal — and remind the user that you are trying to test the prototypes, not the users. Take notes as they use each of your prototypes. When they are done, talk with them more holistically about the three prototypes. Find out what resonanted with each prototype relative to the others, and what missed the mark. While you will gather usability feedback, your primary goal is instead to gain insight into the broader design space and your general design ideas.

Write up a summary of your findings. First, describe your method and who you tested with. Second, tell us what you saw.

Third, tell us your interpretation and reflections. What did the feedback imply about your original design questions that led to the prototypes? Has this activity uncovered any deeper insight into the design space? Does it suggest any ideas for P4?

Looking ahead to P4

These ideas from P3 will become seeds for Project 4. You will be forming groups of three. You will be able to pivot from these ideas, recombine ideas, or push further on ideas that came out of P3 with high promise.

Prepare for studio

Be prepared to present your three prototypes and your user feedback in a total of four minutes in studio. No slides necessary, but you should be ready to talk succinctly about your results.

Submit

Make a separate subfolder in your P3 submission folder for the Part II deliverable. Put in there:

• A PDF with your reflections and changes following your Part I crit.
• A folder for each prototype: the question each was trying to ask, and a description (including images) of each prototype.
• A PDF with your user feedback.

Grading rubric