EnJoin
Enjoy Today was our client again for the second project. However, this time we were given the unique opportunity to ideate our brief. This was more challenging than we realized because we found so many problems relevant to the HvA/UvA communities. We eventually decided to approach the issue of mental health, specifically loneliness, amongst students of both universities.
Part 1: Research and Ideation
We began with creating a mind map of how the four of us understood what loneliness meant.
The next step was researching what loneliness really means. We found a lot of information about its complexities, consequences, and existing solutions. What we found most relevant was that loneliness was extremely complicated and personal to every individual.
Following this important decision, we formulated a problem statement to guide us through the rest of our process.
“‘How can Enjoy Today strengthen the existing student community by utilizing a tool to support togetherness?’”
We then did a ‘brain dump’ to externalize any and all ideas we had about how to approach building togetherness. After writing down our ideas, we voted on which concepts we liked most.
The most popular concepts were formulating a game and developing a sensory therapy experience. We opted to pursue the game idea.
We wanted to validate our decision that potential users enjoyed participating in games, so we conducted micro-experiments to see how they reacted to various games and activities.
Once we confirmed that our target audience enjoyed participating in different forms of gamification, Jim led us in a ‘Crazy-8’ exercise. This allowed us to think of game-based ideas that could help build togetherness. We then voted on our favourite ideas.
Part 2: Prototyping and Testing
After voting on our favorite ideas, we discussed how we could execute our favorites. The conversation allowed us to formulate our final concept; a platform where members of the community could anonymously send messages to each other. We would execute our artifact via AR, where messages could be dropped in an invisible dimension in the canteens.
I made a mockup of what dropping an avatar monster would look like
Another member of my group drew a concept customer journey to show the process of using our platform
The next step was creating the AR prototypes. I played around with 3D and AR software to experiment on how our idea would look. Meanwhile, another group member set up a low-fidelity version of the AR to test how users responded to our idea.
We then tested the prototype on potential users and asked questions about their experience. We wanted to find out how our audience reacted to our idea, and if they preferred a solid object or an avatar. Users responded positively to the concept and preferred the envelope over the avatar. They also liked our design concept
Once our test results validated our ideas, we began building our high-resolution prototypes. We worked on the UI interface to demonstrate the most important screens.
