Over the coming months I will be participating in the NCR sponsored Student DesignCompetition 2010.
The Brief:
NCR use the branded slogan "Experience a new world of interaction" - Takingthisasthetheme, explore what this could mean to you and your generation in the next 2years. What is the new world of self-service interaction? Research and understand whatpeople want their experience to be in relation to a particulararea of self service.Demonstrate how theconsumers experience is facilitated through a concept design. The initial solutions should be able to be brought to market in a two year time frame. All final solutions should besensitive to the NCR brand.
After the initial kick off event - a very enjoyable afternoon where we took part in a number of mini design workshops, together with students from Dundee University and The Edinburgh College of Art, who are also taking part in the competition - left us filled with inspiration and ready to dive right in.
Since then I have been experimenting with different research methods, from story boarding, producing videoprobes, making observations and learning all about geo tagging:
Story Boarding:
Experimenting with story boarding, I documented an everyday interactionthatIencounter.Being a typical student I documented buying your usual drink from an unfamiliar bar andobserved the touch-points that occurred.
My outcome seems quite clinical and lacking in interaction and the true touch points, a first attempt, I find this method a little confusing and a bit vague, this may be due to my limited knowledge of it, however with continued attempts I'm sure it'll improve.
After the Day long GeoTagging Workshop this is the map that the group I was part of Created. We mapped out a route from our building on Saint Andrews St. alongCrookedLane,downHarriet St. along Schoolhill, down to Belmont St. and back to Saint Andrews St. via Blackfriars St. Along the way we documented a variety of things we came across and "mashed up" all of our findings by adding our Twitter feeds and Flickr photos streams.
View grays demo in a larger map
It is a bit raw as it was our first attempt and a fly through of how to collate information in this manner. It's definitely a method I will use again in the future.
http://digitalpud.blogspot.com/
The site that hosted the workshop
http://geo-located-practice.blogspot.com/
I began researching for my project with a massive mind map looking at city living in Aberdeen and the services it provides for me:
- - Part Time Employment
- - Higher Education
- - Accommodation
- - Travel
- - Social life
As a student my time is split up between these services but the majority of my time is spenton social events. This is the are I will focus on for my project as this is where most of thedaily interactions I encounter take place.
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Looking into in greater depth I used the Geotagging method again to document a typical night out that a group of my peers and I would have. This includes where we went, how we
got there, what was happening, how we felt etc, to gain a better understanding of the little details of every day routine things that are mostly over- looked
View A Night In Aberdeen in a larger map
Twitter Updates
From the Twitter feeds we can clearly conclude that a problem that arose more that once was our skewed perceptions of how busy different venues were. We went to a venue we thought would be busy but it was the complete opposite. This then made interactions feel awkward and uneasy, so much so that a strange sort of struggle in our
consciences started to happen - because there were very few people in the bar at that time we felt compelled to stay that bit longer even though the situation was makin us feel uncomfortable, almost as if it would have been rude of us to leave after
one drink or half an hour but at the same time we wanted to leave and take ourselves out of this strange situation.
We then went to a venue we knew well and estimated almost exactly how busy it would be
but went anyway and ened up standing at the bar. We felt it was worth our while to wait for seats to become available because it was a venue that we liked going to.
However when half of us had to queue in bad weather to get into the next venue while the other half of the group were already inside we had no idea how long we were going to have to suffer these conditions and decided it wasn't worth it to stay there any longer and just left. Maybe if we had known that the queue was going to go down in, say, the next five minutes it would have been worth our while then to wait the five minutes knowing then that we would get in...
The solution pretty much made itself clear from these findings. To solve this we need some kind of device/way of knowing:
- - The capacity of a venue.
- - The time you'll have to wait in the queue.
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1] How many days/nights do you go out a week?
2] How many places (roughly) do you go on a night out?
3] What makes you go to those places?
4] Does a large queue put you off going somewhere?
5] Would it be useful to know how long you would have to queue to get in?
6] Does bad weather affect the time you’re prepared to wait in a queue to get it?
7] Would you like to know how busy somewhere is before you go/queue?
8] Would paying an entry fee in advance/getting Q-jump make you want to go to the place
offering?
9] Would finding out it is really busy once you get in make you want to leave soon after?
I got lots of feedback form the survey and the finding show very, very clearly i am not
the only one having this problem...
- From question 4 we can conclude that 73 % of the people surveyed are put offgoingsomewhere if there is a large crownd opposed to 12% who are not put off by the size of the que and 15% are indifferent.
- In question 5, 100% of the people surveyed would want to know and would find it useful to know how busy a place is before they enter it.
- In question 6, 91% of people are put off queing, to the point where they will leave aque or avoid going out at all. As opposed to the 3% who will que regardless of the weather and the 6% who aren’t bothere either way.
- 91% of people surveyed in question 7 want to know how busy somewhere is to judge if it’s worth their while joining the que. Whereas 3% wouldn’t want to know and 6%don’t mind either way.
- In question 8 the gap in the difference of opinions closed with 55% of people saying they would be encouraged to go somewhere that offered an entry fee payment in advance with the ability to then Q-jump. However 27% we unsure of this proposal and 18% saying they would not be encourage by this offer.
- Question 9 told us that only 33% of people would leave if they found out somewhere was really busy after they got in when 42% of people would stay, showing that the knowledge of queue time to get in was more valuable to them than how busy it was once they were inside. 24% were indifferent.
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Question 3 in the survey (what attracts you to those places) had very similar responses
from almost every participant of the survey: The type of musics that a particular venue played was clearly the most influential factor when deciding where to go.
As a lover of music i could relate with this observation completely. Sometimes different venues play different genres of music depending on which night of the week it is. it's often hard keeping up with which genre night is playing where and most of the time, the night you have set aside to go out is the wrong genre for you at your favourite venue. This has
created another problem when people try to tailor a night out that best suits their needs
.
So i thought if there was a way for an integration of something that would show you a
venue playing the music you want to hear that night, the next night, in a weeks time etc.
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As well as being beneficial for customers this kind of knowledge can be extremely useful for the venue owners as well. They can capitalise on the fact that they are quieter and draw the people leaving the large queue into their venue instead. They can also use it to their advantage as a sort of marketing or promotional tool.
From the customers point of view they want to know how busy somewhere is before they go, incase it’s too busy and too crowded for their liking or if it’s too quiet and becomes awkward, knowing the capacity lets customers decide if it’s worth their while joining the queue. They also want to know how long they are going to have to wait in a queue to help them decide if it’s worth it. Knowing this information would allow customers to plan their night and tailor it to suit what's most convenient for them.
From an event owners point of view they need to reach out to their potential customers when there is a dip in the numbers and pull in new customer bases. They need to promote and market their venues in new ways as conventional methods of PR-ing such as “flyer-ing” are becoming out-dated, un-noticed and creates a lot of mess on city street.
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A few other nice little add ons to this concept might include:
- Nearest taxi services/taxi points
- Information on the last bus home
- Places to get food at the end of the night
- Information on getting home safely - a very resonant issue for a lot of people (especially for the parents of students moving away from home for the first time)
We finally went down to Edinburgh to present:
It was... an interesting day.
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