What follows is the entire design process that The Poodlefish Cartel, Scafenguey design team, Joseph Kabenji, Anisa Legesse, Aniela Chertavian, and Ben Lieber, followed in order to transform from initial sketches to the team’s final product.
Observations and Research
The Poodlefish Cartel began as individual designers with nothing more than a design brief in their hands. Individually, each student picked a SCAD building that they were interested in and went to it in order to observe the environment and conduct staff and student interviews. The main objective was to see how scrap materials were stored or disposed of. The four buildings that the team investigated were Alexander Hall (Painting), Fahm Hall (Jewelry), Eichberg Hall (Architecture), and Anderson Hall (Design Foundations). Each one of these buildings had a variety of different materials, supplies, students, staff, and environments. The culture in each of these buildings was built on the type of student that studied there. Similarly these buildings had specific types of scrap due to the types of projects that students were creating.
Each observer conducted an interview with a student, a member of the staff, or both. Everything from the size of the workspaces in the buildings to the variety of tools offered, differed in each building. The information that The Poodlefish Cartel gathered was condensed into profiles that they used to better understand the locations that they had been observing. The profiles that the team developed were a key component in choosing how they would proceed with the app development. The following is a brief synopsis of the research that The Poodlefish Cartel collected:
In all the spaces that the team observed they noticed that scrap material was not heavily focused upon. Perhaps it was due to the time of the quarter, considering it had just started. With the given parameters they moved their designs to center on how to move scrap between students across campus.
  Certain buildings generate specific kinds of scrap
  Scrap is not adequately dealt with
  There are very few recycling procedures in place
  Students were willing to use scrap materials if they had a way of finding the materials they would be   looking for
  Students are willing to trade for materials
  Students are willing to buy materials from other students
  If a system were in place and simple enough to use then students would use it
A Study in Microinteractions
When the observation portion of the project reached completion, The Poodlefish Cartel then moved on to studying other apps and the microinteractions that were utilized. Understanding microinteractions was an important part of the project because it allowed the team to glimpse the little nuances that go into the applications that people, including the team, use everyday and explore how they might be able to apply them to the final product. Even though it was only a slight digression from the central focus of the project it still proved to be an extremely valuable micro-study.
Before moving on to the prototyping phase of the project the team came up with three app concepts. They approached this problem with three solutions. The first was to create a model in which a delivery person would be available to deliver whatever material was needed to a desired location per the users request. The team’s second model was to create a web of collaboration in which students that were in need of a certain skill could access this network and request the skills of other students to alter the materials at hand. Third, was to set a system of bartering on a platform that is similar to a message board that can be accessed, commented on, and up or down voted. These three models aim to connect the SCAD community by recycling excess materials that would otherwise be thrown away and build a bigger and better collaborative spirit.
This is the teams delivery model. When the user accesses Maroon’d they can choose their material and specify where they need it delivered. Once the destination has been set, then students may volunteer to deliver the materials to the user based on an incentive program. For this to happen Maroon’d users would need to create an account.
This is the team’s collaboration based model. Scruzzle is a community based app focused on the spirit of collaboration. When a user needs a material processed they send out a notification and other users can choose to collaborate on that project. Each user would have an account and a reputation tree. This tree has 4 branches: Materials, skills, delivery and collaboration. Each time part of a user’s reputation gets up or down voted their spot on the leaderboard section of the app would go up or down.
This app is setup like a simple community message board. Scafenguey is a barter only app. Any user at anytime can see the list of materials that are available and may comment on the post as the primary means of communicating with the owner of the materials. No user account is needed for this type of app.
This section came to an end with Scafenguey emerging as the idea that would eventually get made into the final product.
Lo, Mid & Hi-Fi Prototypes
It was now time for the team to start the first rounds of prototyping. The first prototype used an app called Prototype on Paper and was compiled by sketching the flow of the app on paper and attaching interactions to the corresponding touch points. The POP prototype was rudimentary, but offered insight into how the app should function when it reached its final stages. In the Lo-Fi stages, the team was able to identify issues that would later be addressed.
For the Mid-Fi prototype, The Poodlefish Cartel used a web based app development software called Proto.io. This is a brilliant website application that allows the user to fully develop the skeleton of an app and briefly outline how the pages will link together. Although, the team did not push this site to its limits, the web app also can implement very basic animations to how how the app may react it input from the user. Mid-Fi prototyping further developed the team’s understanding of the product and outlined major components that were ultimately translated into the Hi-Fi prototype. The Mid-Fi prototyping section allowed them to further develop the issues that they ran into in the lo-fi section as well as recognize some new obstacles that they would have to smooth out before the hi-fi section.
Developing the Hi-Fi prototype was an exciting time because the team finally got to see their work come to a detailed finish. The Hi-Fi prototype was developed on two platforms. The first prototype was developed using a web-app called Pixate. This is a brilliant tool that allowed The Poodlefish Cartel to implement all of the features from the previous software into one place and have it displayed on a smartphone in real-time. Real-time updates were highly beneficial as it allowed the team to use the app at the same time that created it. The final prototype was created using InVision. InVision allowed them to do all of the same things from all the previous sections and add all the final touches that they found were necessary.
After the team’s first pitch they went over their ideas and decided to pursue Scafenguey. Though that is not to say that Scafenguey’s original concept has not changed. Originally it was set up as a simple message board that allowed users to up and down vote posts. That was too conversation heavy and The Poodlefish Cartel decided to expand their concept.
Students should not have to spend the little money they have on materials that another student may not want. During the research phase, the team discovered that the students would rather give up their materials than throw them away. Due to the limited budget of the average student the team decided to have Scafenguey on a barter system. Students can simply trade items they were going to waste for something else. Scafenguey original design did not require a user account and their activity would be saved on their phone. Users can post the material, a photo, and a location and choose which one they would want.
It was really important that the team made the process from posting a material to receiving material as simple as possible. Users self-categorize products by using hashtags. Questions and other inquires can be posted in the comment section. Users can bid the items they have for an exchange with someone else. In order to receive the scrap both parties need to accept the trade. After the trade is made, the comments section becomes a private form of communication for the post owner and the trader to communicate further details about the trade and pick up date and time.
After the next round of pitches, the app made it through the elimination process and added two new members to our team. The two new members had app concepts that were also feasible, but some of the features were too complex for this simplified app creation assignment. That kept the team focused on ideas that were absolutely essential to the app’s functions. It also taught them that if something was overly complicated then the team needed to either completely remove the function or radically simplify it.
During the first couple weeks of Human-Computer Interaction, The Poodlefish Cartel and the rest of the class learned about making things user-centered. The first of the five elements is visibility. This is important because things need to be made obvious as to what they do. Visibility helps the user understand interactions and continue to use them. The second element is mapping. Creating relationships between control and feedback, or computing input to output, makes a system functional. The third element is affordances. Affordances communicate how it should be used, which allows the user and the creator to understand the operations. The fourth element is constraints. Having constraints defines the parameters of use. There are four different kinds of constraints including physical, semantic, cultural, and logical. The fifth and final element is the concept of errors. Errors are important because they communicate problems, which in turn helps with solutions.
The platforms that the team used to create their final product has its own set of restrictions, which limited how detailed they could prototype their product. So while The Poodlefish Cartel kept all five elements of user-centered design in the foreground of their minds, they could not add errors into the code. In order to find errors in their design, they had to closely monitor their user-testing subjects as they used the Scafenguey app.
All members of the team conducted user-testing. Some team members used a video based method of user-testing while some of the other members used a survey style. Both styles of user-testing allowed the team to glimpse at the problems that users ran into while using the app. All test subjects were told in advance that the app was not fully functional, but to imagine that it was so that The Poodlefish Cartel could get the most accurate analytical information. The team found that there were mainly two interactions that kept occurring that users were having trouble with. These conflicts were leading the users to confusion and a feeling of not knowing what to do next. In order to alleviate the conflicts that the team pinpointed, they applied their skills to fix pieces of the app. For example, the team found that all of their user testers had trouble trying to differentiate the Scafenguey Home Feed from My Stockpile. The team easily fixed this problem by changing colors and designs of the page, informing the user that they were in different areas of the app.
 Here is an example of how the conflict recovery was performed by changing the style and colors of the content in order to differentiate different pages within the app.
Throughout this process of creating, developing, and delivering a mobile application, The Poodlefish Cartel’s individual skills grew tremendously since the first day of this class. All four team members agree that they are completing the Human-Computer Interaction class with more knowledge on coding and mother-loving fudge-cakery than they started with. The opportunity to not only obtain the knowledge, but also apply it is invaluable. Knowing how to prototype apps and code website are valuable skills for the team members to have in their skillsets.
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