Prototyping tuesday.














The user in the beginning of an amazing journey!



Another day of intensive work is turning into an evening.

Today after the jumps all teams showed their user joyrneys to some other teams. Our team got very heplful feedback from the visiting groups and that helped us to focus. Until today our user journey seemed to be more like an explosion of things than anything linear.


To narrow the journey down from nine thousand Post-its to four really helped us to focus.

After narrowing the focus it was time for prototyping ..
Our team decided to prototype the four following touchpoints:

1- The different user interfaces of the service
2- The wardrobe + RFID-scanner
3-The laundry basket
4- The style your friends function



















Some of the prototypes.. sweet huh?

The team enjoyed building the prototypes and found them useful for finding things that need to be developed further.

Tomorrow we will show the prototypes for the users and see how they react.

That's all for now.. laters.

Back to work!

Well, this was a great weekend! Some of us relaxed and stayed in Kolding and some of us (me, Femke!) went to Kopenhaven, but all of us had a great time :-)

But now, we're back to work! We've presented our four remaining concepts and then narrowed them down to one. Now our main focus is the wardrobe management system, but we've kind of figured that we could combine most of our concepts to create this super engaging teenage user experience for fashion & friends!

Furthermore, today we've brainstormed a lot about the user journey - how does Anna (our main persona now, her nr 1 need is to bond with her friends and she uses styling, fashion, swapping and giving advice to each other as a means to create that bonding) first get introduced to the system, and how do we get Anna to commit to it?

The most we've figured for now is that it should be done in baby steps: the reasoning is that, buying an entire new wardrobe closet is quite a big step to take all at once! And we've also concluded that this whole system has so much potential and possibilities, that it will be quite hard for us to keep focused on the core concept!

Now we're off to watch the movie, so laterzz :-)

No blog just yet :-)

I was planning to write another blog about our day today, but I'm soooo tired and I want to go to the body beamer bar! So I'll keep it short:

our persona's myFace profiles look like this:

Our design spaces are the following:

• Customisation - help teens to innovate their wardrobe without buying new clothes
• Changing clothes - same as above
• Social Networks & clothing - help teens to bond by swapping/advising about clothes (without buying them)
• Exploring identities
• Managing your wardrobe

We've had this big brainstorm in which we came up with up to 119 ideas, then picked less than ten and refined them a bit. Now we have four very exciting and good concepts to present on monday!

So everybody, that's it, short and simple - have a great weekend!

Persona's!

Insights:
Today we have finished our user research and created our persona's! We promised to give you some conclusions about of research yesterday, well here they are :-) We asked for some advice from Anne the User Insight Superwoman, see the photo on the left. First some general insights into teenage shopping behaviour. They are the following:

- shopping for clothes isn't really about clothes! It's about social interaction, bonding with your friends, being pretty or finding your identity. We found out that swapping, borrowing and giving each other advice about clothes is a very important social ritual for teenage girls. It confirms their friendship and that's very important!
- teenage girls don't always follow the fashion trends from magazines: usually only one or two in a group will look at those trends and for the rest the girls mostly copy each other.
- extreme shopping behaviour isn't about shopping addicts or impulsive buying, but more about the way they want to look and present themselves to other teens.
- teens really ARE interested in having unique clothing (up to a point!) - they like to make their clothing items just a bit more special and personal, but they don't like to (or know how to) do the handwork.


But we have gone a lot further than these general insights: we have created three persona's who represent different kinds of ways teenage girls think about their clothing. We have done a lot of super extreme brainstorming and REALLY getting into the heads of our persona's - you can see the results of our chaotic persona developing process above. So now, meet our persona's!

Stella - the pretty innovator
Primary persona (most wasteful shopper)

Stella is sort of the popular girl in school, always connected to lots of friends and very chatty. She really loves to be pretty and be admired by lots of boys (and other girls of course). Stella is kind of trendsetter in school - she's the one who looks in the magazines and likes to try new outfits. She's buying new clothes almost every week and often throws them away within a year. Sometimes she's an impulse shopper and only hangs on to a piece of clothing for a couple of weeks before she gets bored with it. For Stella it is really important to be noticed and admired because of her looks, so that is definitely what gets the most attention.

Stella's #1 need - to be pretty & fabulous and to be admired

Anna - the sweet imitator
(least wasteful shopper, but probably the largest group)

Anna is a sweet but kind of shy girl who's first interest lies in her friends. She has one best friend and they are more or less inseparable - always hanging out together! Shopping is for Anna very much a social activity, giving and receiving advice and borrowing eachothers clothes are almost a sort of rituals to confirm their friendship. Anna looks to others, especially her friends, to figure out what she wants to wear herself. She is a bit more sentimental than Stella and has this jacket that she is always wearing because it reminds her of all the good times she had with her friends (even though it is not very fashionable anymore), but most of her clothes get replaced in a year or two.

Anna's #1 need - bonding with her (best) friends

Marsha - the profiler
(not very wasteful on average, but sometimes changes her entire wardrobe in one go)

Marsha is the "alternative" girl in school, every six months or so changing her appearance when she has changed her mind about her identity. At the moment she's into her "goth" fase, so she wears a lot of black cothing and eye make-up. She knows her classmates think she's a bit weird, but she doesn't care because she has her own group of friends who accept her as she is, especially since they act the same way. Marsha is actually quite insecure about herself and who she really is - she doesn't really know yet who she wants to be, but she definately knows who she doesn't want to be! Marsha uses fashion and clothing as a way to express her current identity to everyone (maybe including herself)

Marsha's #1 need - to explore (her) identities.

We've also got some interesting design spaces, but we're saving them up for you tomorrow! :-)

User Research!

Today has been a very interesting day so far - now we really feel we are progressing in our design objectives! This morning we made our pitch and our succes criteria, which means that we all as a group now know which target group we are focusing on and what we want to achieve with our design.

The Pitch goes as follows:

We are working with teenage girls to make them want to hold on to their clothing longer.

The succes criteria are:

• teenage girls feel personally attached to their clothing
• they take better care of their clothing
• they feel good & cool doing it!

After that, we thought about our stake holders - what are different parties that influence our users (teenage girls) in their behaviour concerning their clothes? Then we went out to talk to those interested parties. We talked to the following people:

Teenage girls (of course!):

we asked them about their shopping behaviour, how they handled their clothing and if there are any pieces of clothing that were special to them. We also asked if they would sometimes borrow clothing or swap it with their friends. Could there be a way to give clothes a more personal value? How easy do they throw old clothing away, and are there reasons for them to hang on to their clothing right now? On the left you see a picture of one of the shops we checked - we're not posting any photo's of our interview subjects on the internet because we promised not to!

Friends & family:

Luckily, most girls were out shopping with either their friend(s) or their mother, so that made it easy for us to talk to those parties as well. Some interesting things were, for example, that teenagers couldn't name their favorite piece of clothing themselves, but then their friends would point out "Well, what about those jeans you wear all the time?" -"Oh, yeah, you're right..." interesting stuff! We still have to think about the why and how etc, we'll get back to you later on that!

Second hand shops, dry cleaners & do-it-yourself shops:

We also talked to some salespeople in 2nd hand shops and the dry cleaners, because we were wondering about teenage customers and what kind of methods they use to handle their own (2nd hand) merchandise - we wanted to see if there was any chance that teenagers could be convinced to use these kind of shops more often, to personalise their clothing for example. On the right is an example of the massive amount of different kinds of buttons the shop provides. You'll have to wait for our results and conclusions for tomorrow, because it still needs a lot of thinking and then some more thinking about. Yes it does! :-)

We also had some nice presentations, especially Anne the User Insight Superwoman got our attention. We're definitely thinking about paying her a little visit between 10 and 11 tomorrow morning to ask her advice about our user research! (and about 15 year-olds, maybe she has a daughter!). We also still want to talk to some fashion students about the value they give to their own clothes and maybe about their customisation habits - we could think of them as our 'extreme users'.

Power Offer!

Today involved leaving the hostel at 9am (yay, an extra hour in bed!) and taking a slightly longer walk to the KIF centre to attend a lecture day.

Lecture from Jean-Claude Larrèche, INSEAD

The first lecture was from Jean-Claude Larreche the author of The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth. Larreche explained that renewal was needed in order to achieve efficient growth, this involved creating a new vision, new priorities and new missions. The lecture was more focused towards business rather than design, however there were some interesting aspects that we felt were relevant to our project:

• Two engines of efficent growth could be technical discovery and customer discovery.
• If you are not confused in the customer research aspect of design, you won't have any insight.
• Companies should cut their budget for marketing and focus on customer discovery.
• You shouldn't design products, but offers. Customers look at the offer, not the product. So if you make a POWER OFFER, your customers won't be able to resist!
  

Lecture from David Mallard, IDEO

David Mallard from IDEO was very inspiring in his lecture about user research. The large number of examples made clear the importance of user research and how it can shape the final product. Some of the research methods, for example interviewing the extreme users, gave us an insight into to how we should go about researching for our project.

"From a fashion students perspective, I found the lectures fascinating as I have not been taught to think from the customers perspective at this level. I will definitely use this way of researching in future projects."
- Katie Ledger, MA Fashion & the Environment, London College of Fashion (and member of our group!)

One other interesting quote for all you guys, especially all you designers:

"We call our first concepts sacrificial concepts, because they're gonna die"
- David Mallard, IDEO

Some photo's of monday!

Here's the school as we walked towards it for the first time - it was quite a nice sight, especially because of the contrast between the modern design of this building and the more classical design of the houses on the left.

Here on the right you see David Mallard of IDEO, summing up what themes he thought were different in 2009 from 1998. He based most themes on the stories of us students from what we were doing in 1998 compared to what we were doing now.

The themes David wrote down were:

1998 -> 2009

local -> global
ownership -> sharing
disposability -> responsibility
limited choice -> more choice
technological advance -> human needs advance
naïve -> wiser....?

We added some themes to that, which were:

indivivualism -> community
(recognition of) practical needs -> (recognizing) emotional needs in a product
product value -> emotional value

And here to the right is a shot of one of our brainstorm sheets -> at one point we were all writing our ideas down almost at the same time, and because we didn't feel we had the time to turn the sheet around, it got a bit messy at one point. It looked very creative, though! :-)