Exercise 3 Reflections

Post-exercise 3 reflections

Today’s exercise was a success, in terms of personal development and understanding for us all. We began the lesson by brainstorming and just shooting out ideas with the help of pain points etc.-also known as collaborative iteration. The ideas came slowly at first but the rate of which they came accelerated. After we had pumped out ideas we started brainstorming on how we should do it, what types of ideas we should have and so on-the focus on this part of the process was to analyze our personas and categorize their needs. Following that we split the group into two parts to work on separate designs and later on we compared them.

One of the designs was a dating/befriending-app that let you filter on whether or not you wanted to meet local people through the app, the catch is you both had to be on water. A silly idea nonetheless, but not without merit, we felt it encapsulated some of the problems that our travelers might have on the ferry for instance, i.e it revealed a problem space we had missed. Moreover, it has uses outside of its target group as well.

The other app was more of an information-based app where the idea was to design an app that categorized your interests and based on that info gave suggestions on what to do in the local area. This would for instance help one of our personas Max Ripersburg in finding local pubs and bars.

All in all we worked conceptually from our personas, and that led to concrete design. Cycling through different ideas helped us refine our thought and improved the product development. Our paper prototypes took shape but were very rough outlines of what could come to be, sketches so to say, however, they were a great way to anchor some of our ideas onto something. The first idea was partly a mockup, but it is also interesting to see what might happen with such an idea.

Some of our ideas and process follow below, with text:

Part 1, Using collaborative iteration we created more than a few ideas

Part 2, Discussing these ideas as a group

Part 3, The different sketches for ideas

Generally speaking, we believe the theory has been a vital part of our design process so far and it has helped us steer in the right path. In our design process we used Bodker's four roles for using scenarios(p.409 in the book). As we mentioned the previous week we only use the three first roles!
1. A basis for the overall design.
This is something we clearly have done as our applications and ideas are based around our personas and scenarios around the area that we conducted our interviews and choose as our target voyage.
2. For technical implementation.
This is something we are curently working on, we have seen the roots of this above, but the technical implementation is not yet fully ready to be called a prototype.
3. As a means of cooperation within design teams.
It has indeed helped us with focusing and steering us into the right direction!