Caitlin Kantor
User Oriented Collaborative Design:
The Garden
I worked within team of four to interview stakeholders, analyze and synthesize learnings, co-design with our users, and develop a project proposal to address a need for connection and collaboration that we discovered within the mutual aid community.
Phase 1
Learning
The first part of any design process is understanding who will be using the end product.
We started with fifteen one hour long interviews with different organizers , leaders, and volunteers in the mutual aid space (summed interview notes seen on blue post-its). From our interviews we created people portraits (the pink post its) by pulling out key attributes from our interviewees.​
Throughout the process we connected with our users on a deep level to fully understand what it meant to be in this space.​
Synthesizing
​In order to make sense of all the things we had been learning, we had to analyze and synthesize our findings. This helped us find patterns amongst our interviewees. Utilizing the people portraits we made in the previous step, we used various methods to gain insights
such as: attribute spectrum mapping, personality trait mapping, and card sorting.​
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This analysis helped us develop four rich and useful personas. Personas have attributes and beliefs reflected in various people portraits. Whereas people portraits are summaries of real people used to anonymously analyze their behavior and beliefs, personas are made-up people used to inform analysis and decision-making throughout the design process. We used our personas to understand how our user group would react to prototypes, storyboards, and gallery sketches. We also used them to explain our final prototype to over 100 people.
Below, you can meet our four personas:
Phase 2
Ideating
We started our ideation process by categorizing all of the major pain points and problem areas identified during our interviews.
Next, we did The Hundred Ideas activity. The purpose of the activity is to generate creativity so no idea is struck down during this part of the process.
We mapped our ideas on two axis, how possible they were to implement and how useful they would be.
Using our synthesized knowledge and personas we narrowed down to nine ideas.
Co-Designing
We brought paper models, storyboards, and gallery sketches to present ideas to users during our co-designs. Conveying these early stage ideas on paper invited our users to make changes without fear they would "ruin" the idea. This helped create a collaborative environment .
Our co-designs allowed us to update our personas with a clear idea of their values as well as what ideas they would like or benefit from the most.
Phase 3
Developing a Proposal
Through our co-designs, we finalized our proposal: The Garden. The Garden would be a small community garden with large gazebo for events and community building, community board for asynchronous connecting, and website to support the physical space. Our final pitch contained a high fidelity model and website supported by many other medium fidelity materials. These materials included detailed interaction maps, user journeys, notes on how the garden would solve a need that each persona presented, and finally a proposed business model. We pitched The Garden to over 100 people during the final event.
Reflection
Throughout this process, I learned how to lead meaningful user interviews and co-designs, synthesize information in order to gain useful insights, and develop a rich proposal. Interviews with our users helped me understand that they were at the heart of all design and you cannot develop useful proposals without them. The synthesis portion of this project may have been my favorite part because we were able to build helpful personas with the patterns and trends we saw. I learned how