Prime Digital Academy: Welcome Gift

The redesigned welcome gift for incoming Full Stack students.

Project Overview

Other Key Deliverables:

Heuristic Analysis, Prototype Sketches, Client Presentation.

Challenge

How might we design a Prime Digital Academy welcome gift for Full Stack developer students that is useful and personal.

Solution

Based on a heuristic analysis, participant observations, and user evaluations, I designed the Prime Time Mood Lamp. It is a small desk top mood lamp featuring a 3D Prime Academy logo that sits on a stand and adds a personal touch to their workspace. The small size ensures that it does not contribute to any other clutter present in the student’s workspace. Lightly tapping the 3D logo turns the soft, comforting light on or off. When the light is on, it’s Prime Time. This indicates to others in the household that they are in the ultimate “Do not disturb” mode.

Role: UX Researcher & Designer

Tools: Excel, PowerPoint, Slack

Timeline: 1 week

Process

Heuristic Analysis, Participant Observations, AEIOU Framework, Ideation, Sketching, Physical Prototyping, User Evaluations, Client Presentation

Research Methodology

Heuristic Analysis

Using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, the design team conducted an expert analysis of the previous welcome gift, an impersonal and unusable water bottle, using an agreed upon set of key user tasks:

1. Cleaning the water bottle

2. Drinking from it

3. Refilling it

4. Taking the water bottle on the go

In addition, we made sure to pay attention to its overall durability e.g., water leakage, material strength, etc. During this session, my research partner conducted the tasks while I recorded both of our observations and asked her probing questions. Afterwards, our observations were synthesized into an Excel spreadsheet using a severity rating pulled from Nielsen Norman as well.

Findings

The biggest issue we gleaned from our findings was that water sprayed everywhere when my research partner clicked open the straw. This came from residual water from when my research partner initially drank from it for the first time. I gave this a severity rating of 4 (catastrophic usability problem) because of its potential issues with frequency, impact, and persistence. But more importantly, this posed a major issue for Full Stack students whose workspace includes lots of expensive technology and who may also be collaborating with other students around themselves.

Why conduct an expert analysis?

To help familiarize myself with the previous welcome gift design and develop empathy with Full Stack students who disliked the gift.

Participant Observations

To get a better understanding of Full Stack students’ culture, environment, and values, I independently conducted participant observations using an AEIOU framework. To do this, Full Stack students were asked

AEIOU Findings

AEIOU is an acronym for activities, environment, interactions, objects, and users. This was used to organize my findings, observations, and quotes. The main three things students valued are listed below:

Design Phase

Goal:

Design a gift that is personal, comforting and helps Full Stack students stay focused and organized during those late-night coding sessions.

Design Concept

With both my AEIOU findings and design goal in mind, I conceptualized three different ideas. The concept that was chosen by the design team was the Prime Time Mood Lamp.

Design Prototype

I then produced a makeshift D.I.Y. prototype using Plastilina modeling clay, felt, super glue, and a plastic water bottle.

Prototype Evaluation

Three different user tests were conducted over 15-minute Slack video calls, done consecutively with 5-minute breaks in-between each. The participants were Prime Full Stack students who were encouraged to give their honest reactions.  

Before I told the first participant what the prototype was supposed to be, they expressed confusion and disdain over the design and usability of the prototype. When asked about the design’s potential distraction in their workspace, the student mentioned it may be distracting for them because they might touch it too much. This led to the opportunity and recommendation that the stand for the lamp should be extra study to avoid having the cube accidentally falling out when being tapped on.

The next two students expressed joy at the sight of the design. When told that it was a low-light desk lamp, both students immediately concluded that they would use this product right away. The second student specifically stated that they enjoy a dark room with lamp lighting and that this would be a good replacement for their lamp. This insight connects with what was observed in the participant observations.

Client Presentation

A 5-minute presentation of the research and design process was given by me to the Prime Academy stakeholders through an in-person PowerPoint presentation. For a complete look at the final report, click here to download the PDF.

Next Steps

Conduct more usability tests on the new design. During the initial evaluative testing, the audio recording failed in all three sessions. Thankfully, enough notes were recorded to retain important insights from the evaluations. However, without the recordings, the evaluative usability tests ended up being a weaker part of this project. With this in mind, a decision was made to leverage the 12 recorded participant observations from earlier in the research process and highlight them more in the client presentation. This proved valuable as the stakeholder felt that the stronger focus on the 12 participant observations made the presentation more persuasive and unique.

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