rmcad-experience-design

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk08: 6/27

This coming Thursday you will have group work time until 2pm. Please be in the classroom no later than 2pm on Thursday.

Prepare for kicking off project 2 with the following:

1. An email to me with your team name, cc'ing your teammates.

2. A summary (2–3 paragraphs) of urban ag with respect to CSAs and NSAs. i.e. What are they? How do they work? What is the appeal of them to their subscribers?

3. Research questions for the stakeholder interview Thursday afternoon.

By noon Thursday, send me final refinements to your project 1 presentations.

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk07: 6/20

Look sharp for the client coming in Thursday afternoon.

Prepare to deliver Project 1 final presentation (5-10 minutes, about 20 slides in PDF or PPT format)*

Follow this basic content outline:

1. What is it? – an overview of your service concept

2. Whom is it for?  – an overview of your 3 personas

3. Why does it matter? / Why should I care? – Tell the story (your scenario)—from the customer’s perspective—of how the service offering meets his/her needs and goals. As you tell the story, show your service images/ evidences depicting the physical evidences in their context of use. (See Create section above.)

4. How does it work?  – Show your service blueprint as a bird’s eye view of the service ecosystem. Here you could show your persona’s path through the service flow as well as call out at what point each physical evidence comes into play. (See whiteboard photo below.)

*Tips for giving an effective presentation:

Show me; don’t tell me. Make it visual!

Tell a story through the user’s/ customer’s perspective.

Refine your narrative arc based on feedback you received.

Make sure your presentation slides are readable and make the most of screen real estate!

Follow this oral presentation flow:

Introduce yourself. (Who are you?)

Introduce your project. (What is it?)

Get your audience to care. (Why does it matter?)

Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em. (What’s next?)

Tell ‘em. (How does it work?)

Tell ‘em what you told ‘em. (So what?)

**Presentation criteria

 Be sure to include the following:

intro slide

café concept overview (high-level): What is it? Whom is it for? When and where does it exist? Include a map!

Where is it? (neighborhood exploration††)

What’s the business context? (competitive analysis††)

Whom is it for? (3 personas)

service differentiation: What makes it unique?

mood board (interior look and feel)

scenario: Tell a short story of how your user (persona) will experience your service across several touchpoints.

service blueprint: Depict how the service process works. (examples)

3 physical evidence designs—one each for print, digital presence, and environmental artifact

Ping with any questions!

[rmcad-experience-design]

Café interaction food for thought

Jon Kolko on moving past designing objects, artifacts (evidence) to designing for behavior. (KB, this may help you.):

Behavioral Change: The Goal of Our Work

The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance—one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn't talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational. Conversation is only a metaphor for interaction, but it's a useful one. Many of the same ways we "read" an actual, spoken conversation have parallels in describing and discussing interactions between people and things. Consider:

Both conversations and interactions have flow, and often have a beginning, middle, and end

Both conversations and interactions act as intertwining of multiple viewpoints. In a conversation, the viewpoints come from people; in an interaction, viewpoints are embedded in an artifact by a designer.

Both conversations and interactions act as both methods of communication and methods of comprehension; participants both contribute to, and take from, the activity.

Ultimately, both conversations and interactions serve to affect behavioral change in participants.

This is powerful, as it describes an implicit way of extending a designers reach—and personal point of view, or message—into the masses. It is this mass distribution of dialogue that describes culture; we build culture through our objects, services and systems, as we define behavior through interactions. This is of equal prominence to the claim of "designing experiences", yet leaves open the potential—the need—for the people (pardon, the consumers) to actually participate and contribute in a meaningful way. The things we do in the design studio have grand significance in the world. Our design decisions—even small, detailed, nuanced design decisions—resonate for years, and usually in a phenomenally large scale. Yet because these design decisions have an impact that is diffused and quiet, our impact is hard to notice and pin down. Culture is something that's not immediately describable; the question "where does culture come from?" is almost as large a question as "where does life come from", and is equally as evasive.

  Cultural Change: The Implications of Our Work This is a fundamental point that serves to elevate the importance of a designer, and also serves to articulate the implicit responsibility a designer has to the world around them. It's such a fundamental point that it's worth making again, in a more overt manner:

The interaction designer designs various aspects of an artifact.

The designer either explicitly or implicitly hopes to change behavior in a user.

This behavioral change is "baked" into the artifact, and then disseminated, in mass.

The artifact serves as a stimulus to change behavior in society.

This combination of artifacts and behavior describes culture.

Every design decision—from the large and strategic decision to design accounting software, to the small and nuanced decision to use a checkbox instead of a radio button—contributes to the behavior of the masses, and helps define the culture of our society. This describes an enormous opportunity for designers, one that is rarely realized. We are, quite literally, building the culture around us; arguably, our effect is larger and more immediate than even policy decisions of our government. We are responsible for both the positive and negative repercussions of our design decisions, and these decisions have monumental repercussions.

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk06: 6/13

Read "Designing for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage" (Dubberly and Evenson, 2010). PDF here and in Dropbox.

Create your Service Blueprint Document:

1. Type up your service scenario (150–200 words). 

Tell the story of one of your personas experiencing your café.

"Define the key moments of interaction between the characters and the end product or service." –Johannes Schott

Briefly describe the whole service experience from start to finish.

2. Create a service blueprint that supports your café concept.

Translate your scenario into a service blueprint that depicts this experience and its supporting activities.

Be sure to include the line of interaction, line of visibility, and physical evidence.

Refer to ServiceDesignTools.org and Dropbox for examples.

3. Place your service scenario alongside the blueprint diagram.

Place it either in a column on either side, or in a row below the diagram.

You may want to annotate the diagram to connect it to each part of your scenario.

Begin to design physical evidences for 3 of your touchpoints—one print piece, one environmental, one digital. Show your design in context in one of two ways:

service evidence (see 3rd photo below)

service image (see 4th photo below)

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk05: 6/6

Prepare an Ignite-style presentation* (5 minutes, 20 slides). Presentation should summarize the project objective (see syllabus), your research, and your initial concept.

Use the following high-level outline:

What is the objective?

What research did you do?

What did you discover? What does it mean?

What's your café concept? How is it different?

Whom is it for? (Personas, 3 slides)

Mood board (for interior look & feel)

What 3 evidences of service touch-points do you plan to design? (one print, one environmental, one digital)

*Remember:

Show; don't tell.

Slides should have no more than 6 bullet points each.

Use a minimum of 24pt type on your slides!

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk03: 5/23

Read The Image of the City (Lynch) chapter 4 through until 'Metropolitan Form' (pp 91–112a).

Refine your Competitive Analysis doc* based on class critique and discussion:

Be sure to include at least 6 of the 8 categories we arrived at via affinity diagramming. Be sure to include web presence.

Give ample consideration to the structure of your content. That is, create a readily digestible visual hierarchy with your layout and font styles.

Document should be scannable across categories for each coffee shop. (A grid/ matrix will enable this.)

Explore your chosen Denver neighborhood:

Spend at least one hour exploring via walking.

Observe, notice. Take lots of photos, but don’t let photographing distract you from being observant.

Strike up casual conversation with 3 passersby. (If you need an icebreaker, pretend you are moving there.) Do they live, work, or play here? What do they like about the neighborhood? What would they change?

Create and print a Neighborhood Exploration document* (11 x 17”) comprising

neighborhood name

your tagline for the neighborhood

a 75–100 word description of the narrative—Use vivid verbs and concrete nouns.

a small map with the area you explored outlined or highlighted

a matrix of thumbnails of the photos you took (min. 8x8, max 10x10)

*On all documents be sure to include your boilerplate: your name, class name, instructor, semester, document name, document version)

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk02 - 5/16

Hello! We're hitting the ground running this week. Here's what's due:

Read

“Omit the Unimportant” (Dieter Rams)*

Boxes and Arrows’ post on competitive analysis – This is web-oriented, but for the assignment, apply what concepts you can to physical space and customer experience. We will discuss this in class.

*See Dropbox folder for assigned readings.

Draft 1 of Competitive Analysis**:

11 x 17” landscape

3 columns, one per café

300 words and at least one image per café

include a brief assessment of each café's web presence

boilerplate should include: student name, RMCAD, course name, instructor name, version number (v1), date

**Be sure to consult reading #2 above. Also see photo below.

Prepare

to discuss and critique your competitive analyses

to discuss the above readings

to discuss any questions you may have about the syllabus

[rmcad-experience-design]

for tomorrow (4/11)

Prepare a 10-minute final presentation* for our client. See here for reminder on presentation tips.

The goal is to create a complete experience by considering motivations for and barriers to engaging with Slow Food Denver and how those motivations can be capitalized upon and barriers eliminated or minimized.

Please prepare a printed takeaway for our client. (e.g. a flyer or bumpsticker design, etc.)

*Please dress nicely for the presentation!

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk11 (3/21)

Complete your user research. Be sure to capture and document

motives and behaviors regarding food and eating

perceived barriers to participation in Slow Food

possible engagement points (events, media channels, etc.)

Come prepared to synthesize your findings. 

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk10 (3/14)

Conduct research with 6 to 9 Millennials (2–3 participants per person). Aim for an even mix of those involved in Slow Food or Alternative Ag and those not.

Be sure screen participants before engaging them in an interview.

Schedule appointments as much as is possible.

For any guerilla (on-the-spot) interviews, be casual and respectful. Ask people if they have 5 or so minutes to share their experience about local food, etc. 

Be sure to ask permission before taking any photos or recording audio.

Capture participants' responses with detailed notes.

Compile your team's findings into a single document containing a high-level summary and user profiles. Include your boilerplate.

Be prepared to report on your research status and findings at the start of class Thursday.

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk08 (2/28)

Look sharp for the client coming in Thursday morning.

  Prepare to deliver

project 1 final presentation (about 20 slides in PDF or PPT format)*

a polished, print-ready project 1 LookBook** (PDF†)

*Tips for giving an effective presentation:

Show me; don’t tell me. Make it visual!

Tell a story through the user’s/ customer’s perspective.

Refine your narrative arc based on feedback you received.

Make sure your presentation slides are readable and make the most of screen real estate!

Here are two good examples of Ignite-style presentations: Fighting Dirty in Scrabble and How to Work a Crowd

Follow this flow:

Introduce yourself. (Who are you?)

Introduce your project. (What is it?)

Get your audience to care. (Why does it matter?)

Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em. (What’s next?)

Tell ‘em. (How does it work?)

Tell ‘em what you told ‘em. (So what?)

**Lookbook criteria

Employ a design system and layout that includes the following:

cover

title page with boilerplate

table of contents

café concept overview (high-level): What is it? Whom is it for? When and where does it exist? Include a map!

Where is it? (neighborhood exploration††)

What's the business context? (competitive analysis††)

Whom is it for? (3 personas)

service differentiation: What makes it unique?

scenario: Tell a short story of how your user (persona) will experience your service across several touchpoints.

service blueprint: Depict how the service process works. (examples)

3 physical evidence designs—one each for print, digital presence, and environmental artifact

††As needed, an appendix of your research & design process, i.e. include any research that doesn't fit neatly into your narrative arc.

Remember to

A. Create levels of reading through visual hierarchy (Design Junction, Thinking with Type)

B. Balance the voice of the customer with your voice as a designer.

C. Consider the 4 criteria for effective communication:

Is it clear?

Is it concise?

Is it cohesive?

Is it comprehensive?

D. Watch your grammar & spelling! This is perhaps the *only* case in which MS Word is your good friend.

E. Have your LookBook print ready. 

†The bound version will be due March 7th.

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk07 (2/21)

Create physical evidences—digital mock-ups in the form of service image or service evidence—based on your service scenario and service blueprint. You not need not produce these; only show them.

at least one print evidence

at least one environmental evidence

at least one digital evidence

Prepare a 5-minute presentation in the style of Ignite, following this basic outline:

1. What is it? – an overview of your service concept

2. Whom is it for?  – an overview of your 3 personas

3. Why does it matter? / Why should I care? – Tell the story (your scenario)—from the customer’s perspective—of how the service offering meets his/her needs and goals. As you tell the story, show your service images/ evidences depicting the physical evidences in their context of use. (See Create section above.)

4. How does it work?  – Show your service blueprint as a bird’s eye view of the service ecosystem. Here you could show your persona’s path through the service flow as well as call out at what point each physical evidence comes into play. (See whiteboard photo below.)

Remember: Show me; don’t tell me!

We will workshop drafts of your LookBooks in the afternoon. Bring black+white printouts of all your project 1 documentation!

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk06 (2/14)

You may not use black in your documents this week.

Read*

This is Service Design Thinking excerpt (Stickdorn, Schneider)

'Design for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage' (Dubberly, Evenson)

*Both readings will be in Dropbox. The second reading is also available online at the above link.

Create a service blueprint:

Translate your scenario into a service blueprint that depicts this experience and its supporting activities.

Start by sketching a taskflow of the customer actions.

Next add physical evidence, frontstage interactions (denoting the line of interaction), and backstage interactions (denoting the line of visibility).

Refer to ServiceDesignTools.org and Dropbox for examples.

Prepare

To informally present your service concepts in class via the large TV screen. We’ll do these  presentation psuedo-Ignite style (5 minutes per person), then take time to individually discuss and critique.

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk05 (2/7)

Read

About Face 3 pp. 77-83, 87-88, 97-104 (Cooper)

Communicating Design ch. 3 “Personas” (Brown)

Create 3 personas based on your customer research:

2 personas, each representing a certain customer type

1 persona representing the ideal customer type for your café concept

Be sure to include

‘vitals’: face, name, demographic information (age, occupation, etc.)

dimensions: e.g. frequency of use, level of coffee ‘sophistication’, etc.

brief descriptions of qualitative characteristics concerning user goals, motivations, behaviors, etc. (that cannot be simply place on a scale/ dimension)

your boilerplate (document name, your name, course name, instructor name, date, version number…)

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk04 (1/31)

Refine your Neighborhood Exploration doc. See previous post for content criteria.

Conduct 6 contextual interviews:

3 in an independent coffee shop

3 in a Starbucks or Dazbog

Document your interviews in brief User Profiles*:

What are their motives for going there? How often? (Are they a local?)

What activities do they do when there? (Study, write, socialize, etc.)

What product offerings and amenities do they enjoy?

What other aspects do they appreciate?

What aspects would they change?

*Capturing the above will provide insight into your next step in the project process. Be sure to differentiate motives from activities.

Export as PDF and print your docs. Be ready for crit Thursday morning.

[rmcad-experience-design]

for wk03 (1/24)

Refine your Competitive Analysis doc* based on class critique and discussion:

Be sure to include the categories we arrived at via affinity diagramming.

Also discuss web presence and community involvement. (You may pair these together as 'Outreach' or pair 'community involvement' with 'patrons'.)

Give ample consideration to the structure of your content. That is, create a readily digestible visual hierarchy with your layout and font styles.

Explore your chosen Denver neighborhood:

Spend at least one hour exploring via walking.

Observe, notice. Take lots of photos, but don't let photographing distract you from being observant.

Strike up casual conversation with 3 passersby. Do they live, work, or play here? What do they like about the neighborhood? What would they change?

Create and print a Neighborhood Exploration document* (11 x 17") comprising

neighborhood name

your tagline for the neighborhood

a 75–100 word description of the narrative—Use vivid verbs and concrete nouns.

a small map showing the area you explored

a matrix of thumbnails of the photos you took (min. 8x8, max 10x10)

*On all documents be sure to include your boilerplate: your name, class name, instructor, semester, document name, document version)

[rmcad-experience-design]

for 1/17

Draft 1 of Competitive Analysis:

11 x 17” landscape

3 columns, one per café

500 words and at least one image per café

boilerplate should include: student name, RMCAD, course name, instructor name, version number (v1), date

*Be sure to consult reading #3 below.

Read

“Omit the Unimportant” (Dieter Rams)

Boxes and Arrows’ post on competitive analysis – This is web-oriented, but apply what concepts you can to physical space and customer experience. We will discuss this in class.

**See Dropbox folder for assigned readings.

Prepare

to discuss and critique your competitive analyses

to discuss the above readings

to discuss any questions you may have abou the syllabus