UCB BearWalk Booth
College student safety solved with design research
In this project, I worked with two other designers (Amy Gil and Miles Peterson) to identify an issue, conduct primary and secondary research, recruit test plan participants, extract insights, and design and test a solution idea.
Project:
Find and research an unmet user need and recommend a design solution to pursue
Tools:
Mural, Google Drive, Figma, ProCreate, Photoshop
Skills:
Secondary research, primary research, interviewing, concept testing, storyboarding, user testing, personas, journey maps, insight extraction
Course:
Design Research; Purvi Shah
Duration:
9 weeks; March 2021 - May 2021
Brainstorming
Double Diamond figure
This project took us through the double-diamond design process. The image above marks the key deliverables we produced throughout each stage.
My team started out by listing all the various issues we cared about and wanted to explore further in "How might we" statements. We voted on our favorites in Mural and explored a few ideas before committing to college student safety.
Skip to chosen idea's process.
Group HMW brainstorm 1; Mural
Group HMW brainstorm 2; Mural
Idea 1: Environmental Racism
The initial issue we wanted to tackle was environmental racism. We all agreed it was incredibly important and none of us knew too much about it so we thought it would be interesting to learn about. We did some secondary research, generated some ideas, and then tried to frame this topic as a design challenge.
Environmental racism links and sources; Mural
Environmental racism target audience; Mural
Environmental racism problems; Mural
Environmental racism solutions; Mural
Environmental racism Frame Your Design Challenge; Mural
Environmental racism design inspirations; Mural
To get a clearer idea of what our project could look like if we continued in this direction, we wrote up some screener questions for possible interviewees. The ideal participant we were looking for would have been someone who had experienced environmental racism or was at least knowledgeable about it.
Environmental racism screener survey; Google Docs
Idea 2: Light Therapy
The second topic we were interested in was the idea of light therapy as a means to combat seasonal depression. We repeated a similar process to the environmental racism breakdown in Mural shown below.
Light therapy links and sources; Mural
Light therapy target audience; Mural
Light therapy design inspirations; Mural
Light therapy problems; Mural
Light therapy solutions; Mural
Light therapy Frame Your Design Challenge; Mural
Just like in the previous topic, we wrote some screening questions for possible test participants. With this set of questions, we made it explicit to ourselves which answers we'd accept and which we'd reject. The ideal participant would have been someone who didn't get much sunlight because they don't go out much or simply lives someplace that doesn't get many hours of daylight. We were also exploring how the pandemic could have affected the amount of sunlight people get, so the idea of light therapy then shifted into mental health during quarantine.
Just like in the previous topic, we wrote some screening questions for possible test participants. With this set of questions, we made it explicit to ourselves which answers we'd accept and which we'd reject. The ideal participant would have been someone who didn't get much sunlight because they don't go out much or simply lives someplace that doesn't get many hours of daylight. We were also exploring how the pandemic could have affected the amount of sunlight people get, so the idea of light therapy then shifted into mental health during quarantine.
Light therapy screener survey; Google Docs
We put our screening survey in a Google Form and sent it out to recruit participants. None of us knew where the best place to find interviewees would be so we just put up posts in relevant Reddit groups.
Reddit recruitment post
Even though this wasn't the final idea we chose to move forward with, we got some interesting answers from the survey. Below is the data we collected:
Light therapy screener survey responses; Google Forms