For design project 2 I chose the squad Social interactions in shared systems. Based on the description of the project, I expected the project to focus on the technical part of smart home- and professional environments, but it focused more on the social aspect in these situations. Because of this, it was hard to come up with interesting ideas that also fit the squad. In this project, we’ve had multiple different ideas, which had us go through the design process multiple times, before we found an idea which was actually worth following through.
We had one workshop about machine learning, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to implement that in our final design. This is a bit of a bummer for me, since one of my Personal development goals was to use Machine Learning code in project 2. I did however make the digital prototype for our main user test. This had me work in Processing again after a long time. We also had to figure out a way to ‘Wizard of Oz’ the test, which is where my Windows 10 knowledge came in handy.
From the aforementioned user test, I learned that if you want to know specific things from a user test, you have to explain a lot to the participants and have a very controlled environment. In my previous project, I’ve done user tests before, but the feedback from those user tests were still quite bland and did not feel like they added anything useful. In this project the user tests gave some interesting insights in the products we were making. This might have to do with the fact that this project was more focused on the social aspect than my previous project, but it did give me a better appreciation for user testing.
Since we were struggling to come up with feasible ideas, we made use of the value proposition canvas. Before this project, I have not used this canvas before. Using this canvas, we were able to come up with an idea that used the values we discussed beforehand. I will be using this canvas more often in future projects. Due to wrong expectations, I did not learn the things I expected to learn from this project. I did however learn more about the difficulties in designing something in social systems. My appreciation for social design has grown because of this and I look forward to apply the gained knowledge in my next projects.