I’ve gotten to work on some pretty amazing design projects during my time at Northwestern. Here are a few quick highlights, including…
A process I followed to gain key insights.
A research outing I learned a lot from.
And a small design contribution to one of my favorite design projects yet!
How do you frame a problem in order to arrive at an actionable prototyping plan?
In the beginning stages of my service design studio class, we were tasked with finding a service that we had personal experience with, and designing a queueing intervention in context.
My teammate and I followed these steps to arrive at a prototyping plan for a better queueing system for Frida’s—a popular brunch spot in downtown Evanston that often has folks waiting outside in the cold during winter for a table!
Write down general queueing and design insights from class that stuck out to us.
Do people need to physically be in line to keep their spot? Users tend to look for generated artifacts—receipts, text confirmations—for next steps. Users’ previous experiences with similar services inform how they react to a new service.
Come together and choose one insight to brainstorm around.
It doesn’t feel like you’re sitting idle in a line if it’s visibly moving with a clear process in place.
Individually brainstorm “What if” statements around chosen insight.
Come together and discuss/group ideas.
What if standing in line was something people looked forward to? What if waiting in line was entertaining? What if you didn’t have to stand in an actual line?
Through continued discussion of themes that emerged in our brainstorming session, converge again and craft a concise “How might we” statement to focus our second round of brainstorming.
How might we provide people with the sensation of progress while they are waiting in line for food?
Individually brainstorm more ideas for the queueing intervention, using the HMW statement from step 5.
Come together and discuss/group ideas, and decide on one idea or a combination of different ideas to “mock up.” Here are some of the groups our ideas mapped into.
Break down the line
Make it feel like there was no line
Before the line…
Progress markers
Movement in space
General design principles to abide by
Cool things to do in line…
Cool things to look at in line…
Using a combination of the ideas that came from this last step, my partner and I put together a plan to stage a mini version of our queueing intervention in class. We only included key elements and interactions in this initial prototype, in order to get user feedback from our classmates.
We invited the rest of the studio to line up, greeted them at a “window”, wrote down their estimated “wait time” on a paper cup and gave them a free cup of tea in it for them to enjoy as they waited (this was my teammate’s idea, and I thought it was a delightful touch to include in the experience for our “users”!)
We then collected their phone numbers so we could “put them into a virtual queue” (send them a text when their table was ready) and directed them over to a “covered, warm area with music playing through a speaker, complete with heat lamps and standing tables in the alley next to the restaurant” so they could wait for a table. (In practice, this meant sending them over to chat amongst themselves over their tea in a different part of the classroom.)
Our studio played along splendidly and gave us feedback on our artifacts—the text notification with instructions on what to do next, the cup with the estimated wait time on it, and the free tea—naturally as we played out this exercise! It was decided that for Frida’s, implementing the system would be a considerable upfront cost; although the free tea would be cheap and they already have a window in the same spot as in our prototype, it would need to be modified for access to the alley and the heat lamps, tables and tent that would make up the waiting area outside would also be a notable upfront cost. However, it would make the waiting experience markedly better during the winter and would make patrons feel welcome and confident about their status as they waited for a table. If we were actually working with Frida’s on this project, my next steps would be to 1) figure out the exact costs of setting up the hardware and making minor renovations to the window area, dedicating a waiter to attend to the window, and maintenance/daily setup time for all the outdoor equipment, 2) ensure the waiting area would not be obstructing the alley for passing cars and trucks, and 3) talk to management, staff and especially Frida’s patrons to find out if this tradeoff would be worth the costs incurred in the long run!
You have an hour and a half to learn as much about visitors’ queueing and navigating habits at the second largest art museum in the country. What do you do?
Talk to the guard outside the Thorne Rooms—not only are they experts at managing the queue and monitoring visitor flow throughout their shifts, they are the first people visitors approach when they have a wayfinding question!
Listen to folks talk as they go through the exhibit—how are they interpreting the experience to each other as they go?
Walk through the experience as a visitor yourself—where is your attention drawn? What confuses you? What sparks your curiosity? Where do you get bored or tired?
Station yourself out of the way, facing the folks lining up to see one of the museum’s most famous (and busiest) exhibits, and start taking notes…
What are folks taking pictures of?
How long do people observe the print once they get to the front of the “line”?
This is a collective viewing experience with lots of unspoken rules—who moved aside (or didn’t move aside) for whom to allow them a better view?
Sketch the visitors’ sightlines to represent how many folks come in and only look at the Wave versus how many notice the other artworks all around them.
Who doesn’t stand in line or look at the artwork? Where are they sitting or standing—what are they doing?
Design isn’t over once the build plan has been finished…
One day as my whole team was down in the shop building out our puppet theater play station for the Segal summer internship—sanding puzzle joints, coating finished modules with linseed oil, painting little butterflies and caterpillars—I noticed the gears on one of the modules. On the face of this module was a fully functioning interactive gear system. You set one in motion and the entire display starts to move as the various sets of teeth interact with each other. The largest ones had big rods sticking out as handles, and while these could cause some damage to our shins if we weren’t careful, they had the potential to do a bit more damage to a shorter kid running around the play station, stepping back or getting up without looking. I brought this up with my teammate who was working on this module, and she agreed that these could be a hazard and should be mitigated—she hadn’t been planning to make any significant changes to them at that point.
I believe I proposed installing a C-shaped handle that would span the diameter of the gear (something any kid who’s been to a playground is familiar with), and myself and my other teammates launched into a short brainstorming session before leaving my teammate in charge of deciding which option she wanted to build out.
The end result is shown here, with two large, separate handholds. Not only were they much shorter, smoother, easier to grasp, and harmless to anyone who accidentally bumped against it—they also provided a visual cue for kids to grab and interact with the moving gear display at those safe touch points as opposed to grabbing the teeth and potentially getting their fingers pinched. This addition also gave kids more leverage to turn the larger, heavier gears (the push-pull motion it affords is much easier than pushing a single point on the handle around the perimeter of the gear).
This was a small observation and suggestion on my end, but it’s in this way that I strive to always keep an eye out for ways to improve the designs I’m a part of, giving constructive feedback to my teammates and helping find a solution, and ensuring I’m interacting with a design from my user’s POV. These are practices I intend to incorporate into my work wherever possible!