For this part of the project, we were assigned to create personas, go through design thinking and the ideation process, and sketch experiences with our products. Our group went through the steps including:
- Creating personas to drive/inspire our designs.
- Exploring early design ideas for our project by doing the ideation process and sketching.
Personas
Bob is a sophomore computer science major at UMD who has biked before, but never somewhere as congested as Maryland. He thinks biking on campus is a great way to travel in theory, but is concerned with safety due to the amount of people he has to maneuver around on his way to class. Overall, he is very tech savvy and has no problem using the latest applications. He suffers from anxiety and feels increased anxiousness in crowded areas. Bob values a clear schedule, precision, and doing activities correctly.
Sabrina Chen is a senior information science major who is already a biking expert. Some of her recreational activities include biking and when riding through campus she is always looking to get to her end destination as fast as possible. To avoid traffic she is willing to break certain traffic laws some of which she does not know she is breaking. She is average for her age (21-23) at using her phone and the applications on it. She is very frustrated by other bikers who create disorderly bike rack areas, construction on campus that slows her down, and pedestrians who sometimes suddenly veer into her way. Sabrina values speed, simplicity, and getting to class on time even if she leaves her home late.
Maya Powell is a junior geology major who has not ridden a bike since she was a child. She walks and takes the bus to school because she finds it comfortable and reliable. She is is color deficient and can confuse certain colors like purple and blue. This does not affect her too much, but can very occasionally cause annoyances when using applications and video games that do not cater to color blindness. Her only experience with biking on campus is seeing them around and hearing her friends talk about biking as a nuisance to pedestrians on campus. Becoming a biker herself is not something she even considers because she is unconfident in her own biking abilities and does not know any of the rules when it comes to biking on campus.
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Our 4 ideas created through the ideation process
- Our application should be implemented as a mobile app first, built from the ground up for each operating system (iOS/Android). We should not favor one over the other and try to use as many vendor neutral technologies as possible so the experience is uniform across platforms.
- The app should use location services to determine a bikers location, and it must output audio directions in a timely manner so bikers don’t have to look at a screen while biking.
- [tweaked idea] Bikers should have the option of paying a monthly or yearly subscription in order to support the developers and remove advertisements from the app. -> Bikers should also be able to pay a one time, low cost, fee to remove advertisements from the app. We could have discounts for students, assuming they provide and confirm a university email address (.edu).
- Bikers should be able to utilize specific voice commands in order to alert our app to potential hazards, delays, or weather conditions, similar to how Waze operates. The reason behind voice commands is because bikers can’t click a lot of buttons while biking. Example: Voice command “Car accident ahead” would relay an accident has occured at the biker’s location back to our central server. Maybe we could have a cool assistant name similar to how Amazon’s Alexa works to indicate that the app should listen for a command.
Sketch process
The sketching process was completed during and after the ideation phase. At first we had some confusion about what sketches we were going to create and whether we would focus on having sketches on specific features. We decided it would be best to show some different scenarios where the user would be interacting with our application. This goes along with the interaction perspective because it is focused on our user interacting with our app through vibrations and notifications. We tailored our features to be the most suitable to our target users which are students who usually have a busy schedule. In our sketches we wanted to convey the simplicity and ease of use while using our app.