Our Research Process
How we synthesized our findings
During the Spring, we conducted research on emerging technologies and analagous domains, a competitive analysis, and discussions with engineers to better understand power management and explore possibilities.
To further understand the perspectives of our primary stakeholders, we then conducted 17 interviews, including field visits and 1 contextual inquiry, 5electricians and supervisors, 6 electrical engineers, 3 client directors and 4 analagous domain experts
From our 17 interviews, we organized over 700 affinity notes to discover themes and patterns. We then conducted a walk-the-wall exercise with our client to share and discuss findings and inspire new ideas and visions.
From 29 different sketches and ideas, we eventually narrowed down to 3 primary concepts after evaluating the ideas with users and considering feedback from advisors and peers.
To test out all the ideas that we generated from the envisioning sessions, we created storyboards of the cocnepts and talked to potential users about their feelings and reflections on each of those concepts in order to get quick and early feedback on the concepts and also to help in narrowing down oyr focus to 3-4 concpets to build out further which would be of highest priority based on the feedback received.
We used paper, cardboard prototypes to give shape to our initial ideas as quickly as possible.
We tested out the initial prototypes with users to get their feedback, identify what worked well and what didn't and what else could be incorporated in the concpets. As the domain was technical, these sessions also helped refine the content of the prototypes.
Based on feedback from the user testing sessions we moved on to higher fidelity versions of the concepts and built out a chatbot using API.ai, an interactive version of the 3D Manual on Unity, a video based prototype of the AR remote Support concept on After Effects and a the voice component of the Gear Assistant using Google Home
We tested out the higher fidelity versions of our prototypes in follow up user testing sessions to find out usability issues and help refine the concepts further
