Building the foundation for design

Through literature review, contextual inquiry, interviews, prototyping, and visioning, we uncovered a wealth of insights into habit formation and creativity. These discoveries built the foundation for our design.

01 Brainstorming

Going wide, going wild

After finishing up our generative research, we were excited to dive head first into ideation. We started out by going wide, putting all of our wildest ideas on the board and exploring how our research backed them up.

02 SPEED DATING

Testing our ideas

Among all the wild ideas, we picked some most promising ones to generate scenarios and storyboards, and executed speed dating with 22 potential users to evaluate users needs. Below are some of our selected ideas.

  • Maker Kit (Digital)

    Users customize their own products with pre-designed assets on a digital platform.

  • Process Visibility

    Users get to see the creation process of popular creators through videos.

  • Design Reviews

    Users’ works get reviewed by popular designers in their vlogs.

  • Maker Kit (Physical)

    Users receive a package with pre-assembled kits to customize physical products.

  • Maker Class

    Users take realtime online class taught by designers to build creating skills.

  • Analog Design Tool

    Users print out assets, customize products in the physical world, and tranform them back into digital forms.

Findings

Through speed-dating, we were able to collect valuable feedback from our potential users. And it turned out that among all the ideas, the maker kit idea and the process visibility idea are the most promising ones.

As for the maker kit idea, it helps to lower the barrier of creativity, yet protects the feeling of ownership as well. As for the process visibility idea, we identified that the process videos serve as both a source of guidance and inspirations. Besides, we also validated that users have the need for tutorials, but the tutorials need to be in an engaging format.

Based on these insights, we decided to pick the maker kit idea as our main concept, and explore how other promising features can be intergrated into it and form a system.

03 CONCEPT

What is the Maker Kit?

Curated digital assets that users can use, combine or modify to make their ideas come to life.

How does it work like a system?

The vision of our solution is less about a single product but more of a system. Three main focuses we have identified are lower barriers to creation, peer and expert guidance, and collaboration. We created a system diagram to demonstrate how our solution can be integrated into a larger Zazzle system.

04 experience prototyping

Testing maker kit idea with physical assets

How will introducing maker kit change users creating process and collaboration dynamics? To gain a better understanding, we conducted an experience prototyping and invited 7 participants without design background. Each of them was provided with a package of maker kits in three themes. They can feel free to use the materials to design either a T-shirt or a birthday card. During the process, we also provided three types of guidance for the participants: face-to-face consultation, a live-chat conversation, or by watching a tutorial video.

Findings
1 Maker kits are a hit with users

Maker kits ensures high quaility products as well allows for higher level design.

2Tutorial videos of others’ creating process are a valuable source

The time-lapse tutorial video generally receives positve feedback. It not only facilitates users own design process a direct guidance but also provides inspiration to users.

3Participants did not feel that professional collaboration was necessary

None of the participants seeked for direct collaboration during the process. This is related to the difficulty level of the given tasks as well as the fear that others’ ideas may conflict with their own.

4Companionship was highly appealing

The participants enjoyed being present with others, even though they were not directly interacting with each other. They also peeked at each others’ works during the process.