Design Project Day One

The design project is compressed in the space of two weeks so we didn’t have much time to spend on choosing a system. After several quick discussions, we decided to design a home bar inventory system. Following is a summary of our day one activities and the rationale behind them. I’ll be experimenting with different formats for these summaries so it might look completely different tomorrow. Your feedback welcome and encouraged.

Activity: Discussion of different ubiquitous computing systems
Rationale: We started our day off with this discussion in order to choose a system to design. After discussing a ubiquitous computing fridge, I mentioned that we should focus on something narrower in scope such as a system that manages the beer and liquor supply. It was a agreed that this was a good idea, and our discussion revolved around this idea from this point onward.

Activity: Formation of problem statement
Rationale: We realized that we needed to state the problem before we could start designing. We accomplished this by using the problem statement format specified by William Newman (Design a form of solution to enable users in context to perform activity in/with target performance). The final problem statement: Design a luxury home bar system to enable people who like to entertain in their home to manage their liquor supply by never running out of necessary ingredients.

Activity: Learn how to understand the tasks, context and users better through discussion and research
Rationale: After choosing a system and defining the problem, we needed to understand these aspects of the system in order to analyze existing tasks and identify user needs. We gained this understanding through researching home bars on the web, researching liquor requirements in bar and cocktail manuals, interviews with bars located near hotels (we didn’t have any target users immediately available), and email/telephone interviews with friends who would be in the target market for our home bar system.

Activity: Map user concepts that need to be included in the interface
Rationale: Following our user research, we wanted to have a preliminary idea of the different concepts that should be included in the interface in order to guide our design discussions.

Activity: Create personas and scenarios based on discussion and research
Rationale: We needed a representation of the users and their scenarios in order to guide our future design work. Specifically, we needed to understand the real user motivations and goals for a home bar system. This was accomplished by creating personas and scenarios for four key types of users: the party animal, the married couple, the upper crust and the urban socialite.

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