ANALYSIS
The co-designer that we are working with has short term memory loss. This means that he forgets things that have happened a couple of seconds ago. His main issues in daily life are forgetting to do tasks that are planned for the day.
Our co-designer will be introduced with the help of a persona. This way, he will stay anonymous.
Figure 1: Persona
The main issue that comes with his disability is globally visualized in the following storyboard. Our co-designer reads a notification, swipes it away, but then immediately after, forgets what he had to do. This results in him not doing the tasks.
Figure 2: Storyboard
Design Challenge
“Design a product or service for users with short-term memory impairments to not only remind them to take action, but also make them follow through on it.”
During our first interview it became clear that the problem our participant struggled with most is remembering he needed to do something after his initial reminder. For instance when a reminder told him he had a meeting 10 minutes in advance, this would be too early and he would not be at the meeting because he would have done other things within those 10 minutes and forgot about the meeting. Also it is really difficult to have a sense of time. The problem here is taking the initiative to do something.
Co-design methods
Co-design is the collaborative process of designing or better described as “collective creativity as it is applied across the span of a design process” (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). The general idea behind co-design is to involve the end-user and most of the time, also the secondary users in the design process to create a product or service that fits the end user’s needs better (de Bont et al, 2013). The reason to do co-design is that it provides the designers with richer user insights, obtaining a multi-perspective review, getting early validation of user requirements, and acquiring expert knowledge (de Bont et al, 2013).
The reason to use co-design in this project is that we are designing for a specific user with specific needs. The best way to fully understand what these needs are is to involve the end-user in the design process. This way we can learn from his experience and knowledge. With this, we can make a product that fits the needs of the end-user better. We decided on four co-design methods. With these methods we hope to get a better insight in the life of our co-designer, his struggles and how we could help with these struggles.
Day in the life
With this co-design method, we wanted to get a better idea of the life of our codesign participant. This way we could have a better idea of the daily situation that our participant encounters and where he could need our help. To make the exercise more fun we asked him/her to do it in a fun way and we gave examples of a video vlog or a written blog or a photojournal with short descriptions.
While we can not show the results due to privacy concerns we got a video blog with a few pictures of the participant throughout the day. This gave us more insight into his training routine and his current daily life. This influenced our ideation.
Figure 3: Day in the life
Future mapping
With this co-design method, we wanted to get a clearer picture of what the aspirations of our co-designer were, and what keeps him from reaching these goals. For this, we asked him to answer the following questions: What are my ambitions? What do I find difficult? What are my skills/talents? What do I find important? Describe a scenario where you had difficulties? We put these into a simple format so our participants could easily fill them in.
While we can not show the results due to privacy concerns, We received the answers to our questions. This gave us an idea of what the ambitions are of our co-designer and what keeps him from reaching them, and more insight into what we could help with.
Figure 4: Future map
Vision-based design
With this co-design method, we wanted to get a clearer insight into the product for the co-designer. With this method, we first focus on the context, then the user interaction, and only in the end we try to combine this into a product. We mainly wanted to get better insight into what user interaction would work for our co-designer. We wanted to achieve this co-design method by having a conversation around these topics. Due to some communication problems, we did not get to do this co-design method as planned but rather tried to incorporate it into all the further conversations that we had with our co-designer rather focusing on general user interaction than specific products.
From this, we got that our co-designer prefers voice or at least audio notifications over all other forms of notifying. We also learned that text has very little value for our co-designer since he barely reads it.
Future workshop
With this co-design method, we wanted to get creative with our co-designer. Seeing if there were several ideas that our co-designer already has. First, we would let the co-designer critique their current situation. Then we would freely brainstorm ideas for solving the previously defined problems with our co-designer. And finally, we would see which ideas are realistic. Due to some communication problems, we did not get to do this co-design method with our co-designer.
The base for our concepts are the requirements. These will be the guidelines for our ideation process. The requirements are divided into 3 subcategories; functionality, aesthetics and technical requirements.
Functional:
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Should be (at least partially) portable
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Should be discrete
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Should not disturb others
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Should have a different alarm then his medicine
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Should be accessible for caretakers via an online service
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Should give a reminder until task beginning/completion
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Should give some form of tangible feedback (i.e. sound, vibration or visual)
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Should stimulate the user to take action
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Should only stop reminding when the task is finished
Aesthetic:
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Should fit into style of co-designer (minimalist, sleek, simple)
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Should have a bright colour to stand out and grab attention of the user
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Should be interesting for codesigner (for faster adoption)
Technical:
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Should be water resistant
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Should have at least a day of battery life
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Visual feedback cannot be reliant on vision on the left side.
Wishes:
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User can ask questions to device (like Siri)
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User will be reminded again when he gets distracted while doing the task
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Should be usable in and outside of your home
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All parts of the design should be able to give visual or auditory feedback
Requirements
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stappers, P., Rijn, H. V., Kistemaker, S., Hennink, A., & Visser, F. S. (2009). Designing for other people’s strengths and motivations: Three cases using context, visions, and experiential prototypes. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 23(2), 174-183. doi:10.1016/j.aei.2008.10.008
C. de Bont, P. H. den Ouden, R. Schifferstein, F. Smulders, & M. van
der Voort (Eds.), Advanced design methods for successful innovation. Delft:
Design United.
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