PROJECT OVERVIEW + PROMPT | Project considerations, constraints, and work effort
The goal of this design exercise was to demonstrate craft, creativity, and ability to effectively communicate problem solving process in a thorough and succinct manner. I was provided with three prompts to select from to complete this project. The work below was completed in a 7 day period of time and corresponds to the “Names + Faces” prompt detailed below:
Names + Faces: At the beginning of each new semester or school year, teachers are faced with the challenge of remembering names for a large number of new students. Design an experience to help an educator match faces to names, with the goal of shortening the time needed to reach complete un-aided accuracy. Provide a high-fidelity mock for at least one step of this experience.
PROCESS | My approach to the design exercise at a high-level
When kicking off any new project I make sure to take time upfront to properly prepare myself for the work effort ahead. I adapt the design process to meet the needs of the project and account for any constraints or considerations. Because time is the biggest constraint for this particular project, I chose to use it as the backbone to the process diagram below to ensure that time is properly allocated towards each phase.
SCOPE | Review design exercise brief, select a project prompt, and determine approach.
After receiving the email detailing the design exercise, I took time to carefully review the brief and each of the prompts prior to making a selection. I wanted to ensure that my selection could result in a solution that would yield the largest impact given my skill set, size of problem space, and access to end-users. I created criteria (see below) to evaluate each prompt to aid in my decision making. After exploring each prompt, I ended up selecting the “Names and Faces” prompt because I felt that it was the best fit based on my selection criteria.
I spent time breaking the prompt down by asking a series of questions. This was done to both ensure that I was framing the problem properly as well as to make the next step (discovery) a bit easier to begin.
DISCOVER | Explore the problem space by conducting research and synthesizing findings
I started off by conducting secondary research in memorization techniques, education/classroom conditions, and existing tools and products in the market. My findings led me down a few interesting paths. The most surprising path pertained to sales industry professionals and the many books, professional coaches, and training tools targeted at them.
Before jumping into primary/qualitative research, I mapped out the stakeholders who may be impacted, directly and indirectly, by a product solution. Next, I began exploring the affinity between the categories and variables that may be roots of underlying problem(s). The following diagrams show the groups that are currently impacted by a lack of solution in this space and variables for each category.
I identified variables to take into consideration as I planned for and conducted research such as, the individual (educator), the context (classroom), as well as other influencing (indirect) circumstances.
To formulate a research approach, I started by exploring and documenting open questions :
- What is the desired impact/outcome for a solution to the problem?
- Shorten the time needed for educators to reach complete un-aided accuracy with student names
- Why is remembering names and faces important?
- Create a sense of comfort and security
- Provide a positive impression
- Complete a required task for a job
- Make others feel acknowledged
- Build a rapport/relationship
- Connect identity to a person’s individuality
- What other professions share this problem?
- Event planners and staff who need to remember VIPs or attendees at an event
- Concierge and security staff who need to remember guests or residents of a building
- Product/project managers that work with many internal and external stakeholders
- Sales people who want to remember clients
- CEO’s, executives, or managers who need to remember employee names
- Coaches who want to remember names of players and parents
- Members of clubs, churches, or organization that needs to remember names and faces of other members
- What experiences have I had that are related to this problem?
- When have I needed to remember names and faces?
- What was it like to be a student in a large class vs. small class?
- Who do I know that is good with remembering names?
- What were some negative experiences that I have had when a name was not known/forgotten?
- What were some positive experiences that I have had when a name was known/remembered?
- What are the common barriers/struggles of remembering names and faces?
My ability to recruit a large enough sample size of educators was limited due to time constraints, so I decided to forego a structured research approach and protocols. I pushed a few dozen notes out to people in my network that currently have roles that require them to memorize many names and faces and engaged in some really interesting conversations. My research notes and findings are outlined below:
The common theme throughout each conversation was that the notion of matching names and faces was a “sub-task”. It was voiced loud and clear that the ability to connect the individual to important/relevant information that they “had on file” for them was a far more crucial task to enable them to do their job.
Despite the differences in their jobs/titles, the methods they (the research participants) employed to accomplish this were eerily similar - this became even more clear as I transcribed notes and produced diagrams of mental models for each interview. I found that when research participants were referring to “crucial information” about individuals or, better put, “things on file”, they were referring to the artifacts, learnings, and memories that they have accumulated over time about the person they were interacting with. It was easiest for them to recall this information when there was strong association with context (place and time) and/or emotion (strong personal connections). Once this association was made it laid the groundwork for a stronger and more resilient connection between the two people.
NOTE: I am fully aware that “me-search” (aka a reseacher drawing connections to one’s own experience) is poor form for a designer. But as hard as I tried to resist, I began to see parallels to my experience as a qualitative researcher, having to talk with 30+ people a week and weed through each conversation to pull out pertinent tidbits of information to use for a study. There is, however, something to say for the fact that the stories of participants that still stick with me today are the ones that had strong emotional elements, resulted in tangible artifacts, or resonated with me at a personal level. The others are now all just crumpled up post-it notes and coffee-stained pages in a dusty notebook.
After a glass of wine (hey, it was a Friday night...) and some scrappy affinity mapping, I asked myself “if connecting more than just a name to a face is important, how might a product or service aide a user without intervening with the process of forming an emotional, tangible, personal connection during an introduction?”
As I pondered this question, I spent some time crafting a user persona and doodling storyboards of a potential user in their "current-state" experience…
GENERATE | Explore the opportunity space + ideate on potential solutions
To make sure that I was leveraging my research findings throughout the Generate phase, I created a set of tools to aide the ideation process. The tools helped to ensure that stakeholders, association elements, memorization methods, and scenarios of use were at top of mind.
I spent about 2 hours ideating by mixing different memorization methods, scenarios of use, and end users to generate new concepts (the work depicted below is a sample of this effort). Typically during this phase, I facilitate worksessions with cross-functional teams of product managers, user representatives, technical experts and other subject matter experts. This collaborative approach paired with the right activities and tools, results in a diverse range of ideas and potential directions.
I decided to time-box this work-effort to boost my ability to generate as many ideas as possible without focusing too much on the feasibility or getting caught up in minute details (that is the fun stuff saved for the last two phases).
I was able to generate ~20 concept directions in this period of time. I went back and reviewed each concept with my tools in hand and began pulling out elements that I felt met criteria from research findings. This task is something that I typically invest more time into and try to incorporate end-users and other project stakeholders in the concept vetting and filtering process. This helps mitigate the influence of politics and personal preferences in the evaluation and selection process.
REFINE | Map out a high-level user experience for the selected concept direction
In my experience, to get validation and feedback for a product/service POC, it is best to develop artifacts that are tangible, flexible, and help to facilitate important conversations. It is crucial to make sure that the artifacts created in this phase are providing the right level of vision and direction to product development team partners.
For this particular POC work, wireframes of userflows provided the right level of detail needed to think through considerations about scenarios of use for various end-users, potential design elements, and principles.
I typically like to conduct a round of research (interviews and/or usability studies) while the project's designed artifacts are still in low-fidelity format. I used the artifacts created in this phase as probes with end users to help shed light on anything that might have been missed in earlier rounds of exploratory research as well as have more focused conversations around a concept direction. Findings from these studies are synthesized and used to inform design principles for customer experience, establish a product voice (guidance for look and feel of interface), refinements to product increase usability, and prioritization input for feature development roadmap.
DEVELOP | High-fidelity mockup of product experience
"Cubby" is a product with a toolset designed for use by teachers, parents/guardians, and pre-k through elementary school students. The goal of the product and it's interface is to make the collection of information needed by educators for the classroom more efficient without loosing the human element.
Overview of work:
- High-fidelity designs to depict key features of the product (selected from above wireframes)
- Interactive prototype to demonstrate use of the application by end users (context of information collection)
- Style guide to convey how product voice could be leveraged to drive consistency throughout user experience (and work for diverse user groups),
The "Classroom" toolset is designed to be used by both teacher and student. The interaction depicted below is a student working along side their teacher to build out an information-rich user profile. The information captured during this scenario is meant to help the teacher better identify the individuality of each student in their classroom.
Examples of prompts/questions for student:
1) Draw a picture of yourself (Sketch pad)
2) What is your favorite color? (Select option)
3) What is your favorite food? (Form Field)
4) What is your favorite activity? (Select option)
5) What do you want to be when you grow up? (record audio)
6) What are you most excited to learn about this year? (record audio -or- select option)
NEXT STEPS | Gathering user feedback with hi-fed prototype(s)
Given more time, I would have chosen to select key feature flows and develop them into working prototypes that could be tested with end users. The findings from these usability studies would inform product features and functionality refinement that could be made to the product.