Key Concepts

User-Centered Design (UCD), Affinity Diagramming, Storyboarding, Sketching, & Classroom Session

Instructors

Andrew Davis & Catie Baker

Group Members

Alex Heilgeist
Swetha Ramaswamy

Date

Oct. - Dec. 2016

Role

Designer

Overview

For a directed research group in the Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) department, I was responsible for leading, designing, and executing a new protocol for the charette process that considered the unique dynamics and time limitations of the students who participated in our workshops, specifically middle or high school students.

A charrette is a period of intense design activity and in this case, is when students determine the needs of a particular user group to design a final end product that meets those needs by creating use case scenarios as well as interaction flows.

The Problem

The HCDE department found that they wanted to promote human-centered design in STEM fields to kids around Washington state as an outreach effort since not many people are aware that design can be used in STEM fields. As an outreach effort, the HCDE department wants to educate kids the kinds of things that you can do with technology that leans more on the creative side.

In a typical charrette workshop, college students work in small groups and receive only minimal help from the presenters to encourage them to think rapidly of their own ideas over the course of two hours. However, in a high school or middle school setting, time is typically limited to an hour or less and these students generally know very little about design. To solve these problems, my team redesigned the workshop to fit within the time limitations while catering to younger students who might be unaware of how design fits in the realm of everyday technology.

PRIOR EXPERIENCE

Before joining this directed research group, I had prior experience participating in charrettes and also being a volunteer in running one for a group of middle school kids. With this knowledge of how to participate in a charrette as well as guiding kids while they participated in their own charrette, I had already gained insight into what worked well with charrettes — and what didn’t. These are the three main points I had identified from my prior experience:

• Students didn’t always understand the purpose of what they were doing at the start of the charrette.
• Some students have trouble rapidly writing down anything and everything that comes to mind.
• Some jargon that we used was unfamiliar and confusing.

Ideation & Redesign

Our group’s target user group consisted of middle school students from the Yakima area. According to the teacher of these students, they had very little experience with design, which gave us insight into how we should structure our intial revised charrette protocol.

First off, we decided to introduce what HCDE is all about to these students before talking about what a charrette is. This allows us to give them a little background information into who we are, since all of us were not HCDE majors (myself included, I’m an Informatics major) and what the department does that we’re representing.

Next, we introduced the definition of a charrette was and what user-centered design (UCD) means and why UCD would be important during the entire charrette workshop. We made sure to use easy to understand words and when we introduced any concept that was unfamiliar to them, such as the charrette process itself, we made sure to include the definition and give a context of when that word or technique is used.

Additionally, we also decided to stick with the theme of smart vehicles, which is a theme HCDE has used in the past for college level classes, when introducing the concept of the charrette workshop to our target audience. We chose to not change the theme because smart vehicles are something that all of these kids have heard about at one point, but they’re also something that is evolving everyday, allowing room for creative and unique creations for whatever user group that they choose.

We also kept the affinity diagramming that is used for rapidly thinking of possible user groups and then possible needs and wants for the chosen user group. We believed that keeping with the method of using sticky notes to write down lots of ideas would easily allow students to write down ideas without forming attachments to a particular idea. This would allow them to group similar users together, choose the most interesting one, and then define varying groups of needs for that target audience.

While thinking up new ways to shorten and make the charrette workshop easier to understand, we ultimately decided that the drawing of the interface screens should be eliminated. This step is typically the last step in prior charrette workshops, but if often the most time consuming and confusing one for younger students to understand. Our team decided that it would be beneficial to our group of students to focus on the user behind their design and the concept of their product so therefore they should only sketch up how users will interact with their envisioned product, not exactly how it will look like.

To accommodate their 55 minute class periods, we shortened each part of the charrette workshop for our final presentation slide deck and had the timing of each step to be the following:

Introduction: 1 minute (1)
Team introduction: 1 minute  (2)
Context of HCDE: 3 minutes  (5)
Charrette introduction: 4 minutes (9)
Problem: 2 minutes (11)
User type affinity diagramming: 3 minutes (15)
User needs affinity diagramming: 5 minutes (20)
Scenario ideation: 5 minutes (25)
Interaction flow of user interface: 5 minutes (30)
Presentation preparation: 5 minutes (35)
Presentations: 10 minutes (45)
Reflections + wrap up: 10 minutes (55 minutes total)

Execution

In-class room session

The group of middle school students came to UW to participate in our charrette workshop. With the limited time that we had (55 minutes), our group provided all supplies for the workshop, which included large paper easels, markers, pencils, erasers, and sticky notes.

To help facilitate the workshop, our group only had one presenter while the other two of us roamed around the tables, along with the students' teachers, helping any groups that had questions or were stuck. I was one of these facilitators, guiding students to expand on their ideas and answering any questions that they had.

Our goals were to help the students think quickly about possible ideas, not tell them what to do or guide them in a particular direction. We wanted the students to curate their own ideas within their groups to ensure they were thinking rapidly about the potential users, their needs, the scenario of their envisioned product, and how that user could interact with that product. Generating ideas as fast as possible without forming attachments to one particular directions leads to better and more thoroughly thought out designs that actually solve problems.

Reflection

What things went well? What would we change if we did this again?

After running the initial revised protocol that we made with our assigned group of students, we found that overall the workshop went well, but there was definitely areas that could be improved if we were to run the workshop again for students in the same age range.

One of the most glaring problems we encountered were that despite the teachers trying to help their students, they often sent conflicting messages to them because they did not fully understand our charrette workshop and the outcome that we wanted to achieve. To counteract this, we recommend giving the teachers and any facilitators planning materials to ensure they know exactly how to help so we can put on a successful workshop.

Students worked well with the domain of smart vehicles so this was one strength of our initial revised protocol. Because there are multiple avenues to explore with this domain, students had a lot of fun and created creative solutions to problems they envisioned their users having.

Another thing we would change if we put this workshop on again would be to scrap the affinity diagramming and allow students to draw attributes of a user out of a hat instead, in order to create their user, including name, personality, and any traits that they may have. Not only would this save time on brainstorming, each group would then have a well-rounded user to use throughout the charrette. We found that some students would regret the user that they choose, simply because their user didn't have traits that fit their problem or wasn't fully developed. We also think a similar process for the user needs should be employed or all groups should focus on solving the same problem to reduce time spent in this stage of the charrette.

The students told us that sketching their ideas was their favorite part of the entire charrette process. They really enjoyed storyboarding the scenario step of the process before moving onto the interaction flow of their product and were able to accurately convey their ideas. However, we did find that students had a hard time relating to our initial example storyboard regarding a purchase on Ebay and believe a simpler scenario, such as buying a pizza, would better relate to the students so they could understand process better. Additionally, the example scenario was very artistic and detailed so it would be beneficial to show examples that are sketchy and less detailed to reinforce the idea that the completeness of the idea, not the artistic talent, matters most.

Future Development

With the work that my team did and being a part of the first directed research group for the charrette workshops, we completed research that is very insightful and important for future directed research groups in this area. With the things that we discovered from our in-class presentations of our initial revised protocol, we were able to document everything that worked well and what didn’t so future research groups can further develop upon our ideas to create an even better charrette workshop for kids of all ages, backgrounds, and experience.

Our work will help make the charrette protocol applicable to schools across Washington state to help promote awareness of HCDE and other related engineering and design majors.