Minor Project - Part A (Ideation)

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Minor Project - Part A (Ideation)

Week 1 - Week 5 (23/08/21 - 26/09/21)
Ng Mei Ying (0340563)

PRJ62204 Minor Project

Part A - Research & Ideation

INSTRUCTION

LECTURE NOTES

Week 1 - 23/08/2021 (Mon)

Below was the available group projects this semester:

Week 2 - 30/08/2021 (Mon)

In-class learning videos:

Extension learning:

Quick take away:

Design thinking is a process that seeks to solve complex problems by approaching it from the users' perspective. It is also known as the human-centred design solution. It aims to turn ideas into tangible and testable products as quickly as possible.

📌 Part 1: Research & Ideation

(W1) Team Up & Collaborate

During the first class this week, Mr mike briefed us about the project outlines and the available collaborators which were going to work closely with the design school in the miro project. There were several projects that related to different industries available for students to choose from. The projects available include healthcare, food & beverage, recycling as well as urban farming product design. In this module, students would get the chance to team up and work closely with other students from different design specialization backgrounds to come out with a design solution to solve the problem. Mr Mike also introduce us to the spatial website where we could conduct a virtual gathering/meeting in a virtual room.

I was joining the urban farming project in the beginning and I was looking forward to kicking start the collaboration with other design students from different specializations and the Czech student from the Czech Republic. However, due to some rules on forming a group, I had left no choice but to leave the current group and join the SUGOi project. The first meeting with our collaborator from the business team went pretty smooth

Weekly Meeting Record

Q&A meeting session with TBS team regarding their brand & product

# Reflection: The first week was quite chaotic while choosing the preferred project and forming a team. Especially when our team need to relocate our team members as Mr Mike mentioned that the specialization distribution had to be balanced. I felt unfortunate to leave the Urban project as our group have the ideal teammates ever. Therefore, I joined the SUGOi project after the negotiation. Nonetheless, another nightmare seemed to be started when I realised that the project proposal was having too many logical bugs. I realise that choosing the right collaborator was indeed important as the product and the brand proposal itself would define whether it is worth the further collaboration by the design team to provide them with a design solution. As I always believe that the core value of a product or service shouldn't solely rely on visual authenticity, the quality of the product and service itself matters.

(W2) Contextual Research

In the second week, SUGOi design team continued to keep up with the discussion with TBS team as well as do further research regarding the brand, the similar brand competitors and so on. Mox, Zi Yi and I were actively conducting meetings more than twice a week to review and figure out the solution for the SUGOi branding strategies and product unique selling point (which design students were supposedly not in charge of this). Due to the time constrain, our group had to move on to craft the questionnaire design for later use.

# Consultation Note: Mr Mikementioned that we should try to give some more time to communicate with TBS team regarding their business unique selling point and request them to send us the updated business proposal with the updated product unique selling point. If the business proposal still did not revise based on requirements, Mr Mike would communicate with the TBS team and their lecturer directly.

SUGOi Brand Research (Part 1)

SUGOi Brand Research (Part 2)

Contextual Research (Part 1)

Contextual Research (Part 2)

Contextual Research (Part 3)

Survey Question Design

Final Proposal Sent by Business Team

# Reflection: I would really appreciate it if teammates could be more active in participating in the group discussion especially in Microboard and also more responsive towards group messages. I was worrying that some of our teammates would be left behind if our team could find an effective way to get everyone into the same picture. Also, some of the teammates were staying in different countries, hence, the time difference was another challenge to carry out effective teamwork. Besides, the weekly meeting with the business team tends to drain my confidence towards the SUGOi project as the collaboration progression did not seem to be going the right path. I still have a lot of doubts about the SUGOi business model although Mr Mike mentioned that he would talk to the business team and try to guide them to twist the business proposal towards an ideal way. Through the collaboration with SUGOi I've learned that a good presentation skill would able to turn something impossible into something possible, however, immature branding did not worth the time invested by the users as well as designers. I regret to say that I feel deeply deceived and our time and effort invested into this project had gone futile...

(W3) User Persona & Survey Design

During the Friday class, the SUGOi design team had a meeting with Mr Mike to go through the latest proposal provided by the SUGOi business team and we found that there were still many holes in the SUGOi brand proposal… Due to the consideration of ideal minor project execution, our teammates all agreed to dissolve the SUGOi team and join the other teams separately. I decided to join the Extrash group as an all-rounder who was able to dedicate to various design discipline requirements and I really appreciate Mr Mike for giving me this chance to showcase my design skills.

The first day joining the Extrash group was nervous and exciting. I felt a bit of pressure as I needed to get myself familiar with the business brand and keep up with the current design stage in a very limited time. The Extrash design teammates were very welcoming and friendly to me and I was pretty impressed by Kyra, Jonathan and Fazal warm chat to get me to blend into the team better. To facilitate the usual sharing files and meeting discussions among the design teammates, I created a new Google driver and discord server for our Extrash design team. On the other hand, my task to do was to help to check and refine the survey questions.

Contextual Summary (by other teammates)

Competitor Analysis: iCycle Global (created by other group members)

Competitor Analysis: Recycle (created by other group members)

Competitor Analysis: Trash4Cash (created by other group members)

User Persona Confirmation

The moment I went through the users' persona again, I wondered that why we did not have any users around the age of 40 and above. While reflecting my doubts towards my teammates, they also agree that the people above age 30 would be having sufficient interest to participate in the recycling topic as they would tend to be more engaging towards recycling topics compared with the youngsters. Therefore, our design team had made an up-to-date user persona that cover the elderly community.

Interview Question design based on User Persona

User Persona 1

User Persona 2

User Persona 3

# Consultation Note: The industry/business side only wants to see key features / unique pages, computing may require the full flow for their capstone project. Push for the XD prototype for completion of user flowsMr Mike mentioned that the feedback from the business team on content creation is premature; we need to complete our design thinking/user journey map before the content creation. Moreover, we should put a percentage on the user personas to indicate the user amount.

# Reflections:

I was very grateful that Mr Mike was very responsible towards students’ learning conditions to ensure that students were treated fairly while participating in collaboration projects. At the same time, I really appreciate that Mr Mike was willing to give me a chance to join the ExTrash group as a third animation student that will be wearing different hats to cope with multi-disciplinary design tasks.
The project seemed easy and simple but it was very confusing on the first day I joined the new team. The design teammates were very welcoming and I was impressed by the two entertainment design students as they were very good talkers which brought out a brilliant conversation that allowed me to quickly integrate into the team without much concern.
I was grateful that the team leader was very upbeat and keen to keep me updated with the current progression of the ExTrash project. Besides, thanks to the tolerance and patience from my teammates, I was able to catch up with the project in a short timeframe and started to contribute as a teammate.
It's funny to know that when Kyra told me “You only join us for two hours but feel like you have to do a lot of stuff.” I would like to take the words as a confidence booster but at the same time, I was hoping that I'm contributing to the team effectively.

(W4) Data Collection & Summarization

In this week, we were required to find potential interviewees who fit our user persona well. Our teammates were very conscious of finding people around them to fill up the google survey, the process of finding the right people in a sufficient amount went pretty smooth as our user personas covered a wide range of age groups. Aside from that, I invited my relatives to participate in the zoom interview to gather some in-depth points of view from them. During the zoom interview, Mandarin was adopted as the main communication language in order to allow the interviewee to understand and answer the interview question precisely. The whole interview process was recorded and I translate the verbal communication into a Chinese writing report and Hanbo would be assisting to translate the Chinese writing report into the English version.

Google Survey Data Collection

Google Survey Data Summary (By Fazal, Jon, Kyra)

Zoom Interview Transcript (By Hanbo & Mei Ying)

# Consultation Note:

Good question design regarding the specific colours that associate with the recycled items. However, need to ensure the questions designed for either questionnaire survey and interview are “layman” enough to confirm the non-professional participants could easily understand the survey questions.
Exclude the question regarding the preferable app features design as it is too early to ask this kind of question in this current stage. It’s better to ask this question after having the rough creation of a prototype.
The overall questions design was quite complete, and it’s great that the design team was able to gain sufficient participants to participate in the google survey.
Need to summarize and extract the key information from the survey data in Miroboard so that we could move further to start filling up the insight discovery section.

# Reflections:

I found that many of the participants who are not native English speakers may tend to have difficulties understanding and answering google surveys in English. While summarizing the survey data, I realised that there were too many open-ended questions which led us to do extra work to filter out all the replicated answers manually. However, I was glad that our teammates were able to find sufficient participants to hit the minimum targeted participant numbers.

Before the meeting with Mr Mike, our group was having a meeting with our collaborators (EAP & SCE teams) in Microsoft Teams to update the current progress. During the sharing, the SCE Computer Science students had prepared the first version of the low fertility app interface design. I found that it’s important to have weekly meetings to update our collaborators about the current progression although there’s a little to share. Sometimes it would be quite a challenge to work in such a large team as we have to ensure that all people are in the same picture without any misunderstanding.

On the other hand, our team started to distribute the Google survey which we have finalized and confirmed with Mr Mike by this week to the public. I was pretty concerned about the limited time frame as there were only around 2 weeks available to gain sufficient participants to participate in the questionnaire survey. Nonetheless, I’m glad that our teammates were giving full cooperation to ensure the data collection went smoothly.

Moreover, our team didn't spend much time on meetings which I personally think should be carried out on a weekly basis. However, it's worth appreciating that our teammates are trying their best to make use of their time efficiently after every consultation with Mr Mike in order to complete tasks within the class time.

(W5) Insight Discovery & Proble Statements

In this week, we were tasked to complete problem statements as a group during the class including discussion & confirming the insight statement, problem statement and "How Might We" Statements. I’ve collected some reference images on Pinterest as well to add on the ideas sticky notes for the “How Might We” statements/idea brainstorm regarding the app features in Miroboard. I was thinking of having several ideas to build the users engagement like contest activity, app login reward,smart-cam to detect/identify the recyclable waste as well as having a gamify idea that integrates with the Google map. During the discussion with Mr Mike, provided very thorough guidance to summarize all of the “How Might We” ideas at the same time helping us to categorize the sticky notes ideas using different colours. I included the legend that indicates what the sticky note colour refers to in order to ensure our team could understand those sticky note colours better. After the consultation, our team starts to delegate tasks to prepare the design proposal by next week.