Details:
Team: Sanket Shukl, Daniel Thompson, Ruby Hong, Chetan Bhatia
Responsibilities: Wireframing, user research, testing, prototyping, sketching.
Duration: 2.5 weeks.
Type: Graduate class project under Prof. Marty Siegel.
Problem Statement:
Is technology discriminative? Or, are humans discriminative? Can assistive technology be used to help the unexotic underclass? What can 'we' as designers do, to uplift the good cause?
With the CHI 2016 prompt in mind, the challenge for this project was to develop assistive technology for those people who are under represented, usually ignored by corporates, and who really need help. The focus was to work on developing an innovative way to help the unexotic underclass of the modern societal system, in short, doing good for the ones in need.
Exploring the Problem Space:
With the prompt being as open ended as it was, it essentially was up to us as a team to decide what we want to work on and how we interpret and envision technology put to the rescue if those who direly need it. We had plenty of ideas and concepts and so naturally, the best way to go about this was to brainstorm. In the brainstorm session, we decided to focus on using technology to help single fathers, as we thought that there is not much done for single fathers and the fact that raising a kid alone is an uphill battle.
Predispositions and Research:
In the initial meetings as a team, we had come to consensus that primary research should be a key driving factor to inform our design. With this in mind, each team member tried their best to find some single fathers to talk to. In the meanwhile, we tried to get our predispositions on the whiteboard to set the stone rolling.
Unfortunately, we did not have a point of contact with our user group. After trying hard for a week and having our predispositions ready, we were out of luck as we did not have a primary source to gather enough primary research and to prove/ disprove our predispositions.
Handling a setback:
Pressing situations demand those pressing actions. Lacking sufficient primary source with our user group, we decided to change the user group. It was a challenge to assimilate this shift and to keep moving forward.
Since a week had passed and we were unable to schedule a meeting with our user group i.e single fathers, it was a tough time for us as a team to inch forward in the project. We decided to take a call since the situation demanded action. Wasting time was not an option at any point. Following the decider protocol, we all agreed in our next meeting to change our user group from single fathers to single mothers since we had a lot of contacts with our later user group than the former.
Starting from square one:
Once the roadblock was out of our way and we had a new user group, we decided to speed things up. Within a span of couple of days we interviewed four single mothers and gathered back to share our research. Collectively, we analysed the primary data we had and drew our insights.
Insights:
- At the time of need, most single mothers have a support system
- Most single mothers have a tight schedule and they rely on their calendars to schedule everything
- In emergency situations most single mothers are stressed about who they should call for help
- When the schedule of a single mother is disrupted, her emotional well being is adversely affected
Personas:
Discovering our own constraints:
Our design was for single mother who:
have a job or attend school
have a strict schedule
have to look after their child/ children (younger than adolescent kids)
have a support system of family and friends
have access to technology.
To effectively design for a problem space, understanding the constraints is critical. We decided to clearly define our constraints to help us reach a solution in our design process. Once we knew who we are not designing for, rather than who we are designing for, it was easy to focus on the pain points of our user group.
The Design Core:
“To empower the single mother by informing her about the availability of individuals in her support system, at the time of her need, in a way to improve the relationship between the mother and support system.”
Initial Sketches:
Design Solution:
Home Screen:
The home screen simply consists of three options for the single mother to choose from.
- The contacts button opens up the list of contacts.
- Availability button is for the support system side to set their availability or for the single mother to set her availability for helping other single mother.
- The activity log shows the archived records of who has helped the single mother with which task.
This is explained in the further screens.
Contacts Screen: This screen shows the availability of the people in the single mother's support system. The people in the support system can set their availability via the the availability screen.
Activity Log Screen: This log is categorised according to the tasks predefined by the system. Single mother can add her own task category. The name of the person and the timestamp of the time when that person has helped the single mother is listed under this log.
Availability Screen: Here, the support side can set the times when they are shown available or flexible or not available to the single mother. This can be done by importing the calendar or setting up the times manually. If the user fails to set the availability, it is shown as 'flexible' as default.
Setting Availability Manually: If the support side user does not keep an electronic calendar or wants to manually set the times, she/ he can do that via this screen. Hitting the green 'available' button and then selecting the one hour slots in the interface sets those slots as available. Similarly hitting the yellow 'flexible' button and then selecting the one hour slots on the calendar sets those times as flexible.
Furthermore, the support side user can select what task they are available for by long pressing the one hour slots.
Personal Reflections:
This project has taught me a lot of new things in terms of the team process and how to deal with the enemy of creativity i.e mind blocks. Looking back on my key takeaways from this project, following are the important things I learnt.
Things I learnt:
Constructive criticism: In the initial phase of the project, when we were coming up with the user group we would be focusing on, i made sure to look at the positive side of each suggestion given by every team member. We followed the "yes and-" technique to build upon the ideas of each other.
Enemy of creativity: During the course of this project, there were moments when the team was stuck and each direction we tried to explore, we saw the difficulties in making the solution easy and useful. We implemented various techniques to come out of that mind blocking time, like taking turns to sketch on the whiteboard, exploring concepts that were futuristic, constructing on each other ideas no matter what, etc. Though these techniques seem easy to overlook, I understood their importance during this project.
Team hangouts: Meeting with the team outside the studio was instrumental in building a bond of trust and feeling safe with each other. We got to the know each person outside their profession and that gave the team dynamics more grace than ever before.
