GUI design process – week 1

Taking previous week as a base for further development of our ideas in these two weeks (17-28th Nov) we focused on designing graphical user interface (GUI) for solution of our choice. During this process we were guided and inspired by Alexander Wiethoff from CIID and Niels Clausen-Stuck who worked at IDEO for seven years.

First all teams put their ideas from user research week on the wall. Then we formed new 3 person teams. I was with Ujjval and Yves. We went through all the ideas and voted for most promising ones.

We spend next several days on brainstorming and developing our new ideas. We used post-its to describe these ideas, so we could quickly reorganize and extend them.

The idea that we liked most was called Cold Zone. Cold Zone is a state that caretaker is in. He or she is having a break while all requests to him or her are diverted to other caretakers automatically. Now caretakers have rarely time for break but their job can be very stressful. They receive request from the elderly but they never know how important it is. Is it regular request like “I want coffee” or emergency? Having theme of our project “Helping the caretakers is helping the elderly” in mind we started imaging how a device supporting handling request and taking a break might look like.

Because now caretakers use mobile phone-like devices that are quite clunky we wanted our device to be small and portable. On the next photo you can see one of our paper prototypes. We decided to design two devices. One smaller like iPhone for the caretakers and bigger one for the elderly.

When we already knew what we wanted to do we started to design GUI of our device on paper. We did it collaboratively – Ujjval was drawing while we were discussing which features to include.

After Niels advise we created two or three short use case scenarios and designed features around it. This helped us a lot in staying focused on our core value.

In the end of the first week we went back to the elderly homes. We presented our idea to the caretakers and the stuff. We got a lot of positive feedback and useful comments.

We also had an opportunity to present our GUI to some of the elderly. We also tested their ability to use regular mobile phone and an iPhone.

The interface for them consist of seven icons. A big red cross for help, a sandwich and a drink for food, a telephone handset for calls, a dice for games, a speech bubble for chat, a person with an arrow pointing a door for going out and a dumbbell for physical exercises. The most confusing ones were speech bubble and person going out. I was surprising to us because nowadays speech bubble means a chat or a talk, but the elderly should know them a least from comics. In the second case we suspect that reason of misunderstanding was in the way we had drawn a person. Maybe sticky man would be better that rice-shaped person.

After this visit we had several ideas how to improve our GUI concept and we felt prepared for the next week.