The Full Story
For our capstone project, we were allowed to pick any project and partners. I chose to work with Radwa, and we chose to focus on memory.
Picking a Focus User
Memory is an EXTREMELY large focus area. It's hard to even call it a focus. So one of the first things that Radwa and I did was to narrow down onto a user persona. We came up with six possible directions or users. Then we ranked each direction in terms of impact, technology, and business. Specifically, we ranked them based on how interesting we thought the persona would be in relation to each category. We also weighted impact to be most important.
Based on this ranking, we decided to focus on "The Chosen" which was people going through powerful moments.
Interviews, Insights, & POV
With our focus user in mind, we set out to do a full set of user interviews. We focused our interview guide on how people remember those moments and what they wish they had done differently. We also interviewed people who design powerful or immersive experiences and those who deal with the biology of memory. In total, we conducted seven interviews. Below is our summary of the important points from the interviews.
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Once we had all the interviews played out, we rearranged, grouped, and distilled insights. At this point we translated all of it to Mural in order to continue working on it remotely.
And this would be an H5
Displacement & Takeaways
We ran a displacement focused on being mindful and capturing a small daily moment like drinking your morning coffee. We then prompted them to share the moment. We were most interested by the private sharing an the effect of the reflection on people's days.
Based on the displacement findings and our insights from our main set of interviews, we crafted our first POV.
POV: Digital Bonders crave a personable space to savor their special memories with others in order to feel the gratification of reliving a memory themselves immersing others in their own experiences.
Phases of Memory & Picking a Focus
To help understand our focus of memories, we broke it apart into four phases, and we chose to focus on Materialize and Savor. This choice was based on where we felt we could make the most impact and where we had the most energy.
Refining Our Focus User
Even after choosing a focus phase, our user was too broad and we were beginning to spin again, so we decided to refine our focus user again. We brainstormed on the relationship/person, the emotion, and the moment. We decided to focus on young professionals, belonging, and farewells.
Interviewing Again
With our new focus user, we did a rapid round of interviews with three users. We mapped out each just like we did Ghada below. From there we pulled out the strongest surprises from each interview, and leapt to insights with a few of our favorite surprises. Finally, we created six frames based on those insights. We voted on our favorite frame which ended up being this one from Ghada.
Triple Prototypes
Once we had a frame, we brainstormed, and choose three concepts to dig deeper on. These three concepts ended up becoming our three prototypes.
Testing Results & Picking a Direction
We tested Penseive with three people, Sillage with two, and Hiraeth with two. From there, we interviewed each user, pulled out the strongest surprises, and distilled insights.
We decided to focus on Hiraeth.
Building a Works-like Prototype
Now that we've got our focus on belonging and farewells and prototype direction of Hiraeth, we are in the process of building a works-like prototype.