Retail Detail
Role: Project Manager, User Researcher, Interaction Designer
Size: 6 MHCI Students
Client: Novabase Collab
Duration: 1 year
Skills: User Research | Human-Centered Design | Prototyping & Development | Branding
Methods: Contextual Inquiry | Personas & Scenarios | Fly-on-the-Wall Observation | Cultural Probes
This Capstone Project, covering two semesters, involved applying our research, design, and prototyping skills developed in the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) Program to solve a real-world problem for a real-world client. Our team was partnered with Novabase Collab, one of Portugal’s largest IT and Contact Center Solutions Companies. Our goal as HCI consultants-in-training was to understand the conversations in social media that could ultimately affect consumer behavior. We delivered a prototype that enables Collab's clients to use social networks to track, manage, monitor, and expose their brand, products, and services to consumers.
Our project road map took the form of three stages: Exploration, Generation, and Evaluation. In the first semester, we employed several research methods to explore social media behavior and interactions with businesses and users. After synthesizing and analyzing our data, we came to key insights from which we generated our initial concepts. In the fall semester and final stage, we completed ideation and concept validation, followed by three design iterations, each with user testing. The project deliverable was a functioning prototype by the end of the year.
After conducting guerilla interviews, we derived from our data three key personas, one of which is pictured below.
One of my favorite research methods we used was cultural probes. We sent out these packets consisting of a journal and camera to social media users to record motivations of sharing information. From this data along with interviews, both retrospective and guerilla, we compiled our findings to analyze for behaviorial patterns.
To kick off the project, we constructed an affinity diagram with our client to come to a focus.
In total, we conducted 1,115 hours of research using the below research methods to explore social media behavior for businesses and consumers.
In addition to the core work of the capstone project, we created a brand by which we identified ourselves. We selected the name "Pandere" to represent ourselves, originating from the Latin root word "expandere" -- to spread or expand.
