PRIME STUDENT WELCOME GIFT
THE CHALLENGE
Redesign the welcome gift for Prime’s full-stack engineering students.
RECOMMENDATION
Due to the pandemic, students are forced to spend classroom and study time at home, making the full-stack program even more challenging. The Instant Zen Workspace provides a separate space in your home to study, focus, and realize full-stack students’ goals of graduating.
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METHOD & TOOLS
Heuristic assessment
Google Sheets
Design Concept Boards
Sketch
Prototype
Illustrator, Photoshop,
Artifacts from Leonardo’s basement
Evaluation
Directed Storytelling
Persuasive Presentation
Keynote
RESEARCH: The Water Bottle
The water bottle was the previous, and now discontinued, gift to new full-stack students at Prime. In order to break down all aspects of the water bottle’s features, the positives, negatives, the unnecessary extras and the things that were lacking, were noted (we partnered with another UX designer) as we investigated our bottle’s details to the fullest extent. Three tasks were matched with a Heuristic assessment of each. By the end of the exercise it was clear that simplicity is always the rule for success when designing.
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USERS: The Full-Stack Engineering Students
To understand who we were designing for, we saw three videos of full-stack students giving a video mini-tour of their workspaces. We were also given written feedback from students describing what the first week at Prime was like. All of this informed what design concepts to come up with.
DESIGN CONCEPTS
After evaluating the feedback from students, three design concepts were created, shown to peer UX designers, and then narrowed down to just one to be prototyped.
STUDENT ASSISTANT APP
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POWER DEV SUITE
INSTANT ZEN WORKSPAC
RESEARCH-PROTOTYPE-EVALUATION-PRESENTATION
Directed Storytelling was the research method to see if students had an underlying goal of finding a space within their homes where they could find comfort and focus while getting through the challenging full-stack course at Prime. After the initial interview a prototype diagram was shown to participants to evaluate, where they were then asked if the prototype was something that looked familiar, like something they had used in the past, or something they would use if given the opportunity.
Discovery Intake Research and AEIOU observations from student desk tours.
Reveal of the prototype from the evaluation interview script.
Outline of slides for Keynote persuasive presentation.
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PRESENTATION
A persuasive presentation was shown using keynote to stakeholders to convince them that the Instant Zen Workspace
was the best welcome gift idea to help full-stack students meet their goals.
CONCLUSION
I did not show the water bottle to my student interview/evaluators since the water bottle was not even an option, and I
did not go into much detail about why the water bottle was a bad idea in my persuasive presentation, as it was irrelevant
information (although it was uncovered in the heuristic evaluation we did earlier in the week). However, I did explore
material options and built a better prototype that could be used for a second round of exploration and evaluation.
This second prototype was built using materials from Leonardo’s Basement in NE Minneapolis MN.
