KnowBuddy
The Project
In this design brief, my team and I were assigned to design a solution for future cities when catastrophes challenge our society while making the design available for everyone. The expected result was to design a concept for a physical product with a digital application associated with it.
Duration: 1 month
Methods: Qualitative Interviews, Trend Analysis, Moodboards, Story boards.
Tools: Figma, Illustrator, Miro
Context
The product had to work in both a crisis and outside a crisis and focused on a tourism context.
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“We want to boost domestic tourism, in regards to the covid-19 pandemic. This problem is particularly challenging since people do not want to find themselves in a crowded place or a place that is empty”
Research
The research was initiated by doing a trend analysis, identifying current mega, macro and micro trends. We explored different mega trends such as Tourism, Healthcare and Transport & Mobility. Through the trend analysis the scope of the project led towards Tourism where the focus was on supporting local cafés and bars. Three different user groups was identified to scope our project even more, semi-constructed interviews was then conducted with young adults between 19-25 and parents. In the research we collected insights about the different users tourism habits.
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Empathize
The summary of our interviews resulted in two personas that we used during our design process. It was used to define what functionality the application should have and how we could meet user needs with design elements.
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We initiated our ideation by brainstorming and the main idea that we were interested in was a application that could be a tool to plan trips and also support local cafés and bars. Before sketching we created a simple sitemap and then continued to the ideation by sketching ideas.
Concept
The concept was a physical device that was used to collect data for a mobile application, the physical device would collect data about the amount of active devices in an area.
The digital application was used as a platform to promote local café's and bars with discounts meanwhile helping users plan accordingly by visualizing how crowded a place could be with a heatmap.
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To depict the collaboration between the physical and digital product we used a simplified interaction flow in 5 parts.
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When you click the heatmap you can see how crowded a place is.
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The product collects the amount of active mobile devices in a place.
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This data does not contain any personal information and gets encrypted as the number of devices have been estimated.
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The now collected statistics of devices is saved into a database to enable the KnowBuddy service and other uses. For example, the data can later be used by the municipality to understand the movement of people and improve city planning.
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This data-collection from the product and the data from the application is then used to generate the heatmap.
Digital Prototype
The digital prototype was designed first in Figma to create all the visual components. The design was then imported to Framer X where interactions were added.
Reflection
In this project i learned how to work with a cross functional team, in the project group there was two development engineers, a mechatronics engineer and another interaction designer. I also got more experience with working agile, by early in the process working with "Quick and Dirty" concepts that helped shape the final product