Lyrixe

Process

We followed the Design Thinking approach (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test phases) for this project presented by d.school. and tried to do our best for each phase. Personally, I think that this process does not in a linear or circular path as we went back and forth when needed, sometimes more jumping two steps back as well! Accordingly, I define my design approach as continuous process of creating, designing and testing.

Please be my guest to read our full case below and see the end result in the end!

Empathize

After thinking on gift receiving and giving, the phases, emotions, and expectations, as a Design Team we decided to conduct our research to answer following research questions:

• How does the user’s personal experience affect his/ her gift preference?
• How does the relationship between the user and the sender of the gift impact the gift receiving experience?
• What is the part of the gift receiving experience that the user enjoys most?
• What are the specific characteristics of the gift receiving experience that the user thinks is relevant and important?
• How does the user’s expectations regarding the packaging of a gift affect the user’s feelings?
• How does the user feel about the special occasions for the gift giving/receiving?
• What are the elements that make the gift memorable according to the user?
• How does the user’s interests affect the user’s expectations from the gifts she receives?
• What kind of feeling is the user seeking during a gift receiving experience?
• What kind of interaction is the user seeking from the sender during the gift receiving experience?
• How does the relationship between the sender and the user affect the user’s feelings towards the gift?

To be able to find answers to the research questions stated above, we decided to conduct our research with the help of following techniques:

• Ethnographic Interview
• Questionnaire
• Storyboard
• Sinterklaas Gift Giving
• Love & Break-up Letter

After processing the techniques above mentioned, I have listed insights that I found regarding my user. Then, structured a user portrait for her.

Then, we combined our two different user portraits into one to create a persona and Design Vision for the rest of the project:

Define

Taking our persona and research questions into consideration, we formed our design vision as follows:

As the user values experience based gifts and creating new memories with the loved ones, we decided to give her a gift in which she contributes. Our design vision statement includes a token which will be in line with her hobbies and she can use after the gift experience as well, an unwrapping activity that she will be one of the contributors and downloading that activity as a real gift. Then, we needed to find better ways to touch the user's interests, needs and make the experience as engaging as possible.

Ideate

In order to start generating ideas in line with our persona and design vision, we have decided to focus on following How Might We questions on our ideation phase:

• HMW create a music related token that allows user to express her creativity?
• HMW create a token that the user can use it all over again?
• HMW make the user to be part of the digital unwrapping experience?
• HMW make the unwrapping experience fun and surprising the user?
• HMW design the unwrapping experience related to music?
• HMW design a smooth and coherent connection between token and digital unwrapping?
• HMW involve the user’s family in gifting experience digitally?

Then we both sketched more than 60 sketches to answer these HMWs. Following brainstorming and sketching part, we came up with three draft concept suggestions with the help of a morphological chart. After this, we discussed six concept drafts in hand and decreased them into three group concepts. In the end, we agreed on proceeding with one of those concepts for the rest of the project. In the end, we came up with the idea of giving her a karaoke microphone as a token. From the install note next to it, she will access the unwrapping portal. At first she will think that she is just installing it. But then, she will find out that she is doing a karaoke challenge with her family members and in the end, she will be able to download the whole experience video as a gift. Below is the sketch we made for our concept:

Prototype

To be able to understand if the concept we chose works, we first made a paper prototypes individually, then discussed what we had at hand. Over there we realized that my partner and I interpreted the final concept differently and designed with a different approach for the digital unwrapping. In my paper prototype, I was trying to make the singing against family members surprising for the user through first making her sing, then she will see one of the family members singing. On the other hand, my partner decided to show the surprise right after the consent page during the digital unwrapping. Another thing we did differently was the singing order. In parallel with the scenario I followed, both the user and a family member sings the same song but not at the same time. However, my partner’s approach was making them a duo battle. As we both wanted to see the outcomes of our approaches, we decided to do different lo-fi digital prototypes and test both approach.

After testing our lo-fi prototypes' third version, we came up with a combined solution for hi-fi prototype. We decided to go with my partner’s approach with the help of the feedbacks I got and checking the Design Vision. Accordingly, we decided to reveal the surprise right after accepting a shorter T&C and approving to voice access. Then we decided to go with the duo singing as we were aiming to strengthen family bonding of the user’s family in Design Vision. Accordingly, having a simultaneous singing video as a gift in the end would be a better fit. However, we decided to change some parts in her approach. For instance, the user won’t know who will be she singing against till she selects a song as we did not want her to feel bad selecting one family member against other and make her curious about the next steps.

Try our final prototype out here!

Test

For this project, we have conducted more than 8 tests on different stages of the prototypes and improved our final prototype with the help of the feedback we got. In the end, we conducted tests with our actual users. They both reacted like this prototype reflects both of them (without knowing what were they saying as we conducted simultaneous tests. Accordingly, we made sure that we touched the persona characteristics through this design.

Check handout document here!