Prototyping our product was done digitally. We created a website and a mock-up of an application. These two items worked to highlight the the key differentiators of our product in order to demonstrate the aspects of our product that most need evaluation from testers through concept testing. This process was not too difficult as it was significantly informed by our previous work. However, I did learn two important lessons after completing this phase.
Outcomes
Our product is essentially a new-age residential building. The focus of the building is social, physical, and mental health. It includes features such as private space “mood” rooms, where residents can come to unwind and relax in silence or peaceful meditation. Other amenities include a large communal kitchen, a social lounge, and more. The building accommodates these public spaces with compact private spaces. In addition, we developed a concept for an app that connects residents and helps facilitate healthy practices. This includes a mechanism to schedule group walks to work, facilitate building-wide social events, organize cooking lessons in the communal kitchen, allocate shared chores, and more. The application is meant to work with the residents of the building to enable a healthy lifestyle.
Challenges
Prototyping the key differentiators of our building
Because we are proposing a large residential building, there are many factors that contribute to the experience of choosing and living in a specific place. These factors are highly aesthetic in nature. Although we ultimately want our users to experience and evaluate our health and wellness initiatives within the frame of the building, we know that appearance is inextricable to experience when it comes to digital experiences.When we designed the website, we had to keep our persona in mind because our persona is relatively young, and experiences a substantial amount of digital interactions. So we paid attention to the design of our website and accompanying social media account when creating this product. In doing so, we just had to make sure that we did not spend time where it did not serve to make an impact. For example, I began creating a logo for our company to display on the main page. When the logo began commanding a lot of attention, it was reasonable to back away from that aspect and remind myself that this specific detail is not of utmost priority in bringing attention to the key differentiators of our product.
Focusing on the user experience
When describing the wellness initiatives included in our building, our team added a lot of relevant details. One question that I found I was asking myself when going about adding details to the prototype was: “How would I experience this?” I found this question to be useful in evaluating how I construct the visual effects of the prototype. In designing the application that will organize all of our wellness activities, I organized the visual as a step-by-step process on a mobile phone that begins with accessing the interface, and ends with successfully scheduling or joining an event. This specific part of the experience was unclear because we did not fully formulate expectations for this as a team. Instead, I imagined how this process could be performed smoothly, and showed my team for approval. It helped to focus on a smooth user experience when prototyping the more ambiguous portions of our user’s experience with our proposed product.
Conclusion
Overall, prototyping greatly helped think through our user’s experience with our product. Now that we have a better understanding of our user’s experience, we should be prepared to test our features with a small group and collect feedback through concept testing.