How Might We Encourage Fun?
Given a general “How Might We” question design a product or experience that embodies our idea of a solution. Because it the question is so broad we sought to narrow down using user research. We compiled a list of the various kinds of people we would like to interview: children, the elderly, part-time workers, students, and full-time workers. We posed a guiding question: “What do you like to do for fun?” and let the potential users lead the interview as a conversation to understand what brings them joy and what limits these interactions.
Insights
We gained insights from our user research and learned that people divide their idea of “fun” into what is available to them. There tend to be first choice activities and secondary activities. When one isn’t available they do the other. We also discovered that the idea of fun can fall in the field of something that occurs “unexpectedly”, such as a spontaneous trip with friends or discovering an old Polaroid when cleaning the house.
We narrowed down our user group to full-time working professionals who spend 80% of their time at their desk. We centered our interviews around these people and found that they viewed their work days to be repetitive and mundane. We wanted to inspire them to find a bit of fun in their everyday routine by focusing on creating a surprising and unique interface on their desk.
We decided we wanted to make a product that would engage with users spontaneously at random intervals during the day. Initially, we created a low-fidelity prototype (cardboard, felt, and wind-up toy [picture 1]) to use as a model to conduct user testing. We were able to gain promising feedback that shifted to develop a mid-fidelity prototype (laser cut plywood, servo, LED neopixels, vibration motors interacting with Arduino [picture 2]). From this user testing we learned that people would rather a desk toy that was more inconspicuous and simpler.
Through multiple iterations and user feedback we went from a light-up, sound producing model to a small toy penguin that is inconspicuous and engages the user via haptic feedback in response to different actions (patting the penguin’s head, shaking, or squeezing).
