How do you address current issues that researchers have while planning for the future? Our solutions tackle these challenges now and ensure sustainable solutions for years to come. However, our process was not straightforward.
200+
Sketches
3
Major Iterations
15
Usability Testing Sessions
30+
Hours of Design Synthesis
We started with 6 different directions
We experimented with a creative approach, sketching rudimentary wireframes to visualize our thoughts and immediate solutions based on our research.
Ease in collaboration
Assistance in data cleaning
Support and guidance
Ease in finding existing data
Efficiency through automation
Guidance on regulatory concerns
Our design philosophy
As designers, it is our responsibility to address more than today’s problems. Hence, we looked at different futures treating them as reality and ideated for them. We then took our ideas and brought them back to something we could implement today. This helped us progress towards the future for this tool that was in our reach.
Going crazy with the brainstorming
We brainstormed over 200+ ideas, mixing and matching all sorts of cool technologies, problems, and audience groups related to our problem space using 3 sets of cards.
We discussed these ideas, categorized them, and identified underlying themes. This process helped us group related ideas together and prioritize stronger concepts over weaker ones.
Conceptualizing ideas
Using conceptualization methods like 'User Enactments' we envisioned our ideas into potential solutions. Here's a video of one of such ideas:
Bringing these concepts back to present
We sought inspiration from existing products and tools to guide our approach, ensuring we evaluated the practicality of our solutions within real-world constraints, including those specific to Princeton.
In this concept, we were inspired by Microsoft Excel's formula bar which helps you to write a query to filter and manipulate data and this is what it looked like.
Now, armed with our sketches, concepts, and inspirations, we began creating the first iterations of our designs, envisioning them as potential solutions for our problem space.
We then tested those prototypes with actual stakeholders who are potential users of our product. Based on their feedback, we made significant changes to the workflows and designs.
Interestingly, we were able to identify additional findings that contradicted some of our initial research. As a result, we revisited and revised our research to better inform our design decisions.
