Product Design:
New Welcome Gift for Students
Background
When the water bottles that Prime Digital Academy has been giving to their Full Stack Engineering students got discontinued, they took it as an opportunity to re-evaluate their welcome gift and see if they could change it up. Students had been reporting that the water bottles weren’t very personal, and not usable, so they asked to make the gift something entirely new. The client wanted the new gifts to fill the gaps that the water bottle left, and be both usable and personal to the new students.
Methods and Deliverables
Heuristic Analysis
User observations
Physical prototyping
Desirability studies
Directed storytelling
Design concepts
Persuasive storytelling
Heuristic Analysis
We first performed heuristic analysis on the water bottles they had been getting before, to get a sense of what caused issues with them before. While using the Nielsen Norman Group’s Severity Ranking System on a physical object was a little different than it’s usually used, it was a helpful lens to examine the issues with the product. Included to the left is an examination of the heuristics that the bottle violated, and below are some process shots of the analysis process.
User Observations
A key part of the process was starting with fly-on-the-wall observations of the students while they were at work, to get a feel of what their day-to-day looks like. During their working time, I spent time observing two different classrooms at work. Following the AEIOU strategy of observation (activities, environment, interactions, objects, and users), I used these observations to start brainstorming and trying to identify ideas that would satisfy the user’s wants and needs.
Design Concepts and Prototyping
Next was generating a few ideas and design concepts for new gifts. Considering my observations of the students, as well as my previous experience being a developer myself, I put together three design concepts to develop and consider. After discussing with others in my cohort and putting it to a vote, it came down to the mechanical keyboard.
Taking this idea, I went to a workspace that provided a lot of raw materials to design and build things, and began work on a prototype.
The materials at hand included a different keyboard, to which I added key with the Prime logo on it. While this prototype wasn’t perfect (mainly, it wasn’t a mechanical keyboard, which is the key part of the design), it did serve as a keyboard and a physical object for test users to interact with and give feedback.
User Feedback
I then performed a Desirability Study/Directed Storytelling interview with 3 current Full Stack students to get their opinions on the product. I asked questions about the keyboard design, their experiences and preferences on mechanical keyboards, and what their home office setups look like.
Their feedback was largely positive, and also provided some ideas to take forward when continuing the design process. They mentioned features of keyboard that they liked, what they might expect from one that Prime gave them, and pointed out some key pain points to avoid. The pain points were that a roomful of mechanical switch keyboards could get noisy - so they should have silent switches. And with a laptop setup, they’d expect to receive a mouse as well so they wouldn’t have to use the trackpad with their keyboard.
Final Pitch
Taking all of this process together, I assembled a pitch explaining why a mechanical keyboard would be a great gift for the students, and presented it to some representatives for the client.
Takeaways and What I Learned
This was a learning experience, and included a lot of new things for me. It put me out of my comfort zone to work with raw materials and try to build an idea in real life. It was my first time interviewing users I hadn’t met before, and it was my first time trying to have to pitch an idea. I enjoyed the change and the first attempts at new processes, and look forward to doing more work like this so it feels less like a stretch in the future.