Exploring tech-led design processes with an interdisciplinary team at the IDEO CoLab
For two weeks, I worked as a Winter fellow with IDEO CoLab staff, fellow academic fellows and corporate fellows to work with emerging technologies.
My role combined user research, strategy, physical and digital prototyping, and visual design.
My team's challenge involved understanding people's perceptions around used cars and discovering ways to improve their experience.
I examined questions such as “What are the concerns and hopes of the people we are designing for?”,“How might we communicate trust via the interfaces we work with?”, and “How might we communicate the behind-the-scenes actions that our technology is performing?”.
After examining our brief, and building an initial user journey, we were encouraged to make rapid prototypes to help us explore questions we didn't have answers for and to surface questions we hadn't considered.
I created user testing guides and led my team in developing a card sorting exercise to surface what was important to the people we were testing with.
We created a dashboard and steering wheel to help our testers get a better idea of the service we were creating.
I led my team in surfacing insights from our user research sessions. We were able to build themes and patterns that I placed into prototype iterations.
We connected our dashboard and steering wheel to our digital prototypes to communicate how our potenial service works. These prototypes were tested by those in the CoLab community.
I led creation of a separate interactive prototype based on the research we gathered. We tested it with people within and outside of the IDEO CoLab community.
This prototype was another use case for the underlying code that my teammates were building.
Our team was able to create prototypes that have the potential to improve a person's relationship with a used car.
Through our research we learned that while people are interested in how tech can improve their experience, having a human connection is still wanted and vital for trust.