Mehran comes to class

Mehran came to class today and gave a great lecture on rapid prototyping. He talked about the great advantages of investing time into cheap proofs of concept before beginning to develop and deploy potential solutions to our problems. After his talk, our team decided to pick his brain a bit about how best to rapid prototype and gain insight into applying these learnings to our own project, which will take place in a group context. Do we create paper prototypes for every single person in the "car"? Do we do user testing in groups or do we stick to individuals?

User testing with paper prototypes

Mehran brought up some good points about the poor interface of listening to music in his BMW (as well as other actions). He cited the difficulty of using the knob while driving, the non-intuitiveness of turning the knob while using maps (turning right actually zooms out, contrary to most people's expectations), and the confusing nature of navigating through his music library once he plugs in his phone. To our delight, he also emphasized the frustration of not having a solution that seemed particularly accommodating to someone who should be focused entirely on the road, one of the core goals our team had settled on after our first brainstorm session.

Confusing BMW knob

Difficult to navigate music selections

We had a great discussion and decided to do a bit more brainstorming afterward to incorporate some of the things he mentioned. What if we tried harder to emulate the low-friction, low-cognitive-load and classic experience of listening to the radio? What if everyone in the car could contribute songs from their own "radio station" that users could switch between?

We ultimately decided that we will create a survey to send out to as many of our peers as we can before our liaison meeting next week in order to do some initial needfinding and gather some data before we decide how to narrow down our search.