Product design
Full-stack Student Gift Redesign.
My role:
I performed a heuristic analysis on the current Prime full-stack welcome gift; a water bottle. I gathered insights about full-stack students through ethnographic research organized with an AEIOU Framework. I then created three different design boards of gifts I believed would be a better gift based on my research. Looking back on research, I individually created a physical prototype and tested it with a concept evaluation on full-stack students.
Research methods:
Heuristic Analysis
Ethnographic Research
AEIOU Framework
Physical low-fidelity Prototyping
Concept Evaluation
Research Protocol
Tools:
Nielsen’s Guidelines
Zoom
Slack
Google Docs
Sketch
Miro
Felt
Clay
Heuristic Analysis
My client, the stakeholders of Prime Digital Academy, provided the design team with the current welcome gift for the full-stack students of Prime. It is an inexpensive plastic water bottle. My teammate and I conducted a Heuristic Analysis on the bottle.
Goal: We performed a Heuristic analysis on the current gift to determine if it is a usable and personal gift for the full-stack students based on Prime’s values.
Insights: Using a set of heuristics to evaluate this gift accelerated the process of determining this water bottle to not being a good fit for full-stack students.
Ethnographic Research using AEIOU framework.
Goal: I then conducted research to determine what would be a good alternative gift. I began by watching videos that were provided by Prime showing the students home work space. My notes were sorted by using an AEIOU framework. Next I observed and listened to full-stack students describe their lives in Prime during a group Zoom chat room adding on to my notes.
Key Findings:
Most students had thrown together make-shift work stations with whatever space they had at home - sometimes tiny rooms being shared.
Most students were finding trouble taking a break from their work while being at home.
Prime students are excited and proud to be in this program with their Prime stickers, t-shirts. They love being apart of the community.
Having support from Prime or other Prime students is something they are really seeking.
Design concepts.
I went into the design concept boards with the values of the Full-Stack Prime students were conveying through my research. Comfort. Release (some kind of brain stimulation i.e. fun). Peace of mind. I presented these three boards to my peers, and based on the feedback and the research I collected I landed on the a fidget toy of some sort would be perfect.
The prototype.
Goal: To conduct research on my design concept and determine if this gift is a better fit for the remote full-stack students I created a physical prototype of my design. With the concept of a fidget toy I also wanted to add the touch of comfort in there and went with a redesign.
The Prime plushy would act like any other plushy, soft to hold - the Prime logo’s dots would be represented by Pop It type of a fidget toy where you could push them down to play with. I brought out the Prime logo to add the touch of a pride the full stack students described,
Concept evaluation.
Goal: I performed a concept evaluation by interviewing three separate full-stack students to determine if this fidget toy plushy would be something that would be more personal and useful to them.
Insights: The full-stack students were able to understand my design concept through the presentation of my prototype. During the evaluations I showed them the 3D model prototype during the Slack call. They connected immediately to the Prime logo and understood what the functions were.
Evaluation findings.
Insights:
All full stack students said they struggle to find a way to release stress, especially working from home when the disconnect from home and work life is harder.
For accessibility a student disclosed they had ADHD and it would help them greatly to have this plushy to fidget with to help them concentrate.
When asked to rate the toy on a scale of 1-5 of being useful all three of the students rated it as 5.
When asked to rate the toy on scale of 1 -5 on being unique and personal the mean rating was 4.5/5.
3 out of 3 of the students found it relaxing, supportive, and something that would greatly help them focus,
“I am kind of upset that I don’t have this toy right now to help me destress this week!” - participant #3
Evaluation plan client pitch.
“The Prime logo feels very personable and makes me feel prideful to have this support!”
— Participant #1
“It’s very portable. I can see me taking it anywhere and finding myself playing with it.”
— Participant #2
Conclusion.
Based on the evaluation findings, the response to the plushy fidget toy was all extremely positive! All of the remote full-stack Prime students reacted so enthusiastically to the idea of this gift. They all felt they could truly have this toy with them anywhere - either reminding them to take a break or use to help them concentrate. One research participant stated that this kind of gift would show Prime is showing a great value of empathy toward their full stack students. Based on my research and concept evaluation, I one hundred percent believe this plushy toy would be a more usable and very much more personal gift for a full stack Prime student.