Kickstarting UX Career with a Design Thinking Project

This is not a mainstream online application

Disclaimer

This is a problem-solving challenge, I am working on a basic design problem of a living room. The problem was taken up without any prior learning or teaching. During this project, I unlearned first before learning, so apologies in advance.

“Student for Life”

Introduction

Design thinking allowed taking a look at problems from a completely different perspective. The process of design thinking sets a pathway to look at an existing issue using creativity.

My first project at Growth school, I began my first project given to us — a Design Thinking project where I had to optimize the Living Room experience of ONE of the three users I interviewed. Each member of the group was assigned a topic area to work on. We were required to work on our topic area considering the remaining people in our group as our users.

Why a Design Thinking Project?

This is what they told us that it was a little exercise to

1. Understanding the problem from the user's perspective.
2. We had to empathize with our users.
3. Identifying their Pain points and trying to find an easy solution for the users.

I empathized with 4 users for this problem

After speaking with them I understood their living room usage and found out their challenges. The users belonged to the 23–40 age group. I recorded all four interviews and took down notes during the interviews. Each interview lasted for around 30–40 minutes because I needed to dive deeper with my follow-up questions. I prepared sets of questions keeping in mind that it’s a pandemic. People are living with their family and therefore will use the living room quite often. I spent hours framing “the right questions,” questions that were open-ended yet specific to the living room to gain maximum insights. I did not restrict myself to these questions in the interview and continued to dig deeper. With each interview, I could see what I could have done better in the previous interview and kept getting better, friendlier, and more confident with each interview.

Few of the questions for the interview

After a thorough interaction with the users, I was able to identify the different types of living rooms based on the different purposes the rooms were used for.

• A living room
• A living cum multi-purpose room
• A living cum dining room

I defined the problem statement on my own as : What is an ideal Living room?

Some common quotes by my users about their experience were:

“I need to move to another room when the guests come over my family needs space, which disrupts my work”.

“I do not like the fact that everybody treats dining room and living room the same”

“ I would like the dining and living room to be separate as it would look better and will be more convenient when the guests come over”.

The common dissatisfaction I could see with two of the four users was that they were unhappy about the fact that there was merely no difference in their living room and dining room, the less space between the two rooms made their experience was unsatisfactory.

Here are a couple of insights into my interaction with the users:

User 1:
Pranathi is a lively, creative, 26 years old professional working as a Presales engineer. She wishes the room was simple and spacious with less furniture but cozy and comfortable

she would want the furniture in the room to be of leather based.

She also explains that Tv is huge, which does not fit in with the dimensions of her Tv unit and also the window being right opposite to the TV has reflection on the tv screen all the time.

For her living room is something that she spends most of her time in.

User 2:
Revathi is currently a housewife, is on a break from work. and is enjoying her sabbatical in her house in hyderabad. Her favourite space in her house is her living room and she lives with her husband and her In-laws in hyderabad.

Would love to have a different dining space or a divider to help different the living room and dining room.

and would love to have a Revamped TV unit, as the current one is old and not pleasing to the eye.

User 3:
Samson is a 32 years old professional working as a Tech lead at Tech Mahindra. He loves watching tv in his living room, it’s like a meeting space for his family of 5 members and have some quality time together.

He would also like to have the room carpeted in order to make it more cozy and comfortable room and would be nice to be able to locate the remotes of each appliance as quickly as possible without much hustle of searching .

User 4:
Tanmay is a 22 years old recently graduated. He lives with his parents, grandmother and a younger brother.

A lot of time is spend in the living room for relaxing as the sofa is pretty comfortable. Tanmay would like to renovate the cabinet and tv unit and mount the tv to the wall and have the cabinet to be utilized much more. such as with books., etc.

He would also prefer having another room for the dining area and have more space for the living room. or maybe have a foldable table instead of a dining table.

In short, It was interesting to learn how each user had something very different and unique to say about their living room. Their choices, behavior, attitudes about the room were completely different from one another. Conducting these interviews helped me see their living rooms from their perspective, each perspective was different from the other because of what their house is like, where they were from and how different they were as people.

How I defined the problem

After interviewing all the users, making interview notes, and going through the interview recordings again, I jot down all the challenges I could understand the users were facing.

The common dissatisfaction I could see with three of the four users was that they were bothered by having no proper TV unit or the Tv not being right for the size of the room, or the cabinet space not being utilized properly, and also two of the users faced the issue with having the dining in their living room itself which did they preferred having separately if they had a choice.

I wrote down all the problems from the users’ perspective here

All users challenges in a nutshell

I wanted to choose a problem for which the solution was not obvious but something that would require some “jugaad”. The problem with underutilization of TV capacity was common among 2 users, whereas the space of dining room interfering with their Living room was another problem for the latter 2 users. I already had some crazy ideas (not okay).

In my case 2 of my users had a different set of problems and the other 2 had a totally different problem

So, here is my first solution to the problem statement:

not an original image

The user's house was built this way since the family was small, The best fit for the dining table was near the living area near the sofa or right behind it.

Having the dining table is a problem for the user as it eliminates the distinguishing factor between a Living room and a dining room and family members prefer watching television while having their meals.

Ideation for the problem

Since no one can make more room for the dining table, the best solution that comes to my mind was to have one can add a movable sliding partition to separate the dining room from the living room.

My couple of ideas were:

1. To build a small concrete wall (too expensive and not movable).
2. Have a wooden divider (which would require a small expenditure).
3. Having a fancy curtain for division.
4. Having different color walls for the distinguishment.
5. Keeping plants in the living room to act as the divider.

Prototyping

Keeping plant as a divider for living room and dining room.

Reasons -

• It makes your living room look better and you have separate spaces for the dining and living room.
• This is quite easy to implement as well.
• It’s pretty cost-efficient.

Result: My users were happy with the solution of having the plant as the divider of the living room from the dining room as an efficient solution and economical. They happily rated the solutions I provided a 10/10.

I went on working ahead with the second set of problems that were identified during my time of interaction with the users, there were other two users whose biggest challenge was that their TV unit was disorganized causing a hazard in their living room.

I came across another problem from my other 2 users

Not an original image

There were other challenges that the two other users face daily basis, the underutilization or disorganization of the television unit.

As a UX designer, I am supposed to help rearrange the Tv unit of the user in a way that helps them search the items and correctly organize the cables.

Ideation

The best solution that comes to my mind was to place a label on drawers which would help the users to identify the types of equipment in the drawers. Another problem was how to fix the cables around the tv unit.

My couple of ideas were:

1. Reorganize the items in the drawers.
2. Add labels on the drawers to locate which equipment goes where (like Xbox, remotes, DVD’s, books, etc)
3. Have the cello tape tucked against the cables to the wall (which would help the cables from not lying on the floor or making the unit look untidy)
4. Have a plastic holder for the cables (but would not be a “Jugaad”)

Prototyping

To have the items in the drawers reorganized and to have the cello tape tucked against the cables on the wall.

Labeling and taping the cables

Re-organize the drawers of the tv unit and label the drawers and add a cello tape to arrange the cables.

Reasons-

• It’s easy to implement.
• A one-time effort and a permanent solution.
• Won’t cost anything to the user.
• User will get to make whatever he likes the best
• Can redefine his entire TV cabinet

Results:

My users were happy with the solution of having to rearrange the drawers neatly with the labels on them and adding cello tape against the wall on the cables as an efficient solution and economical. But we're unsure of the cello tape of holding the cables for a long time. They happily rated the solution provided a 9/10.

Finally as said this is my first project and these are my key learnings from it

1. Got into exploring totally different aspects of life problems.
2. There are so many ways to solve a problem, but you need to look for the most convenient one for the user, and it need not be a fancy solution. (the label)
3. To emphasize with the users and provide solutions to their problems.
4. I was able to explore solutions economically and effectively. (plants)
5. Be a self-critic. Think about the feasibility of your idea and what could go wrong.
6. Dig deep to find out the core reason for the problem.
7. Asking open-ended specific questions is the key to knowing your users.
8. Don’t try to impose your idea on the user because you like it.
9. Find out the root problem that the user is facing by asking more questions.