Varun Khanduja - User Experience

RESEARCH

FIRST CHALLENGE was to find a core for the design for a mundane activity like walking. We started with ethnographic studies in various parts of Bloomington city, IN. This ethnographic observation and focus group helped us identify the target group of graduate students (23-28 year) for our design since they were tech savvy and in a college campus we were primarly sorrounded by subjects who were students. The focus group helped us to understand various issues and motivation graduate students have while walking around the town. A person's environment was one of the emerging problems they perceive to be a problem as well as motivation for walking. Literature review during this process helped us understand researchers prespective with relation to walking and health benefits associated with it. We also conducted random interviews with people walking on the streets to ask them of the various artifacts they carried while walking and used this information to have an understanding while coming up with concepts for our design. Affinity diagrams were used to consolidate the data at hand. Overall process was divided into 3 phases. The first phase was about research and coming up with slew of ideas. Our group decided to have Music Walk as our main concept from this phase. The second phase was about designing a interface and perform usability test on the application. With the user testing performed this phase also involved one cycle of redesign . The last phase was about paper writing for Design and Emotion 2010. The concept of music walk incorporates the idea of generative music by allowing a person's walking pattern act as a input towards the generative music.

TEAM AND PERSONAL CONTRIBUTION

Team involved Xiying Wang, Chitmeng Cheong and Ammar Halabi. Chitmeng and Ammar were the moderator's for usability testing and focus group session respectively. Xiying was a very active note-taker during usability tests and focus group. The paper prototypes and presentation compilation were a team effort.

Personally I was the facilitator (project manager) during the first phase of the project. Preparation of script for focus group, usability testing, observation of the usability testing session and data analysis were other responsibilities. Actively participated in designing the interface, keeping the findings from user research in mind throughout the design process.

FINAL DESIGN

After two rounds of redesign and user testing we delivered a the interface of a mobile phone application named music walk to help graduate student have a different experience of their environment while walking. MUSIC WALK makes the mundane activity of walking a new experience by integrating the external and internal factors of a person while walking. For example if you are walking, it would see where you are walking, lets take downtown and have a music background changing according to a pre-determined theme for the downtown. The rhythm of the song will change according to your pace of walking. As a part of strategies we envision this product not to cost more than 5 dollars since existing iPhone applications( Bloom) based on similar idealogy cost $3.99.