Integrated Product Development Trade Show Winter 2019

Overview

A device that dispenses a storytelling prompt for parents and children to answer, together.

Challenge

Visualize the situation of pre-adolescent children ages 9-12. As they develop their autonomy and independence, it is also a critical time to establish healthy habits that can lead to positive life outcomes. Kids today interact with technology more intensively than in any previous generation.
Consider the offered products, and how each would impact good health habits in areas such as nutrition, physical activity, mental health, technology/media use, and sleep.
Decide how you would spend up to $150 of IPD money on these products.

Timeline

Team

Jan 2019 - April 2019

Stamps School of Art & Design, Ross School of Business and School of Information.

Role

Problem Addressed

Product Designer

1. Address the most dreadful question for children:
“How was your day today?”
“What did you learn in school today?”

2. Product that impact children’s relationship with their parents

3. Deepen the interaction between children & guardians

4. Main focus on engagement for the children - enjoyable for both

Problem Statement

Our product, I’ll Go If You Go, is a device that dispenses a storytelling prompt for parents and children to answer, together.

It helps emerging adolescents build positive relationships and trust with their guardians by creating a space for them to learn about each other through storytelling.

Process Overview

Problem Statement

Our product, I’ll Go If You Go, helps emerging adolescents build positive relationships and trust with their guardians by creating a space for them to learn about each other through storytelling.

Brainstorm

Ideation

Before we came up with our IGIYG product, we jotted down 100+ product ideas for children based on our research of their needs.

As we came up with the 100+ ideas, we saw that there were themes that we could categorize our ideas into, which were:

After carefully considering the categories, we decided to focus on:

   • Guardian Engagement
   • Confidence
   • Independence
   • Self awareness.

User Research

User Interviews

Interviewed with 12 children with their guardians

Sample Interview Questions & Answers

From our interview, we found out that children:

   1. Like to be in control
   2. Love to explore
3. Can be impulsive
4. Like to try new activities
   5. Enjoys interaction with people

Concept Test Survey

These are the concepts we used to test and get feedback and we updated our product
visuals with more detailed elements so that it helps us to start thinking about the materials
or technologies that could be useful when we’re trying to build our products later on.

Results

Summarizing the total number of feedback we have from our survey and interviews,
we have 50 respondents from our survey with a pretty good distribution of age group,
we also had a total of 12 interviewees, including 4 kids, 2 parents, and 6 grad students
that provides us really good feedback for us when testing and refining our prototypes.

Through this concept testing survey, an overarching goal would be
getting to know that does our ideas well address our product brief
and if not, how can they be modified or refined?

Visualized Results

Further Ideation & Feedback

   “The onus of starting a conversation is on the device, and not me - I love that.”
   “The questions shouldn’t all be so serious - they can be fun, too!”
   “I like that this is physical - because I could just ignore the notification on my phone”
     “I would love to know more about my parents, because I know nothing about them.”

Takeaways

1. The device sparked engaging conversations - parents and children were willing to open up
2. Kids are curious to learn more about their parents
3. People loved physical cards (instead of an app-based interface)

Personas

Design Process

_{My Role}

I worked as a product designer on this project.

Some of my responsiblities include:

1. Planning & defining product ideas
2. Visualizing potential prototypes of the product
3. Leading the team with visual directions
4. Creating physical prototype (collaborate with engineer)
5. Designing all design elements for the team & product

Product Idea Refinement

Designs - Engineer and mock up

Electrical Drawing - Functionality

For our prototype we connected an arduino, a mini thermal printer and a push button switch.
The arduino stores the code, the questions and checks for when the switch completes the circuit.
Once the switch circuit is completed, the arduino sends code to the thermal printer to print the prompt.

Final Version

Refined Engineering Drawings for Final Prototype

Trade Show

After total of 3 rounds of design reviews of presenting, receiving feedback and refining ideas,
my teammates and I spent the last two weeks building our:
1. physical (looks-like) prototype
2. funtional (works-like) prototype

On April 10th, Integrated Product Development class hosted a trade show.
Members of the University of Michigan community and the general public
were invited to meet the student design teams, test out prototypes of their
new products.

Huge thanks to Kelly, Kartik, Eron and Valorie!

Access our website: https://valoryxiaowen.wixsite.com/igiyg

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