Ruchita Lodha || Jamie Monville || Gina Herakovic || Kaavya Samu

Introduction

In Milestone 2, we conducted diary studies and interviews to understand the user's needs towards securing their valuables. This helped us expand our original idea towards contexts such as productivity, usability, and portability. Milestone 2 also helped us identify the product usage scenarios and we started to raise questions about the social and technical constraints that our design would want to address.

We determined the different use-cases where our product could be useful and expanded our user target group to understand the different contexts better. We also considered peer feedback from Milestone 2 in considering features to consider and potential pain points for our target users. For Milestone 3, we decided to test the user interaction with the product within different social contexts and identify user preferences towards how data will be communicated to and from our product. We developed user enactment studies to carry out an early concept testing with our potential users and analyzed the study to refine our idea.

Study Design

We designed a matrix based off the Speed Dating Matrix. We defined the three dimensions as working and carrying the device, leaving belongings for the device to protect, and the devices being stolen. We chose five enactments to study from the matrix. We designed our user enactments to understand how people might use a security device when it is attached to their bags and when they are seated in a public place.

We created the following research questions to help guide our user enactments:

• Do users want the device to intervene on their behalf (by being loud/bright?) or would they prefer to be alerted and choose which action on their own?
• How disruptive to the environment are the users willing to have the device be to potentially prevent theft?
• Do users prioritize it enough or deem it relevant enough to remember to bring it out upon arriving somewhere?
• How automatic, and self-sufficient do users want the device to be?

Study Plan

We implemented five user enactments based on the above research questions. Using insights from our interview and research, we brainstormed on the various locations our device could be used at. After narrowing down to three relevant locations, we wrote various scenarios to test our product use. Even though we expanded our idea in Milestone 2, we decided to create enactment for the most important feature of our product: securing valuables in public places.

We recruited participants in our network who are students or currently are working remotely. Due to the stay-at-home restrictions, we decided to keep all enactments at home with our close family members or friends. All the participants satisfied our target user criteria. To mimic the physical device we are designing for, we used small animal figurines that are roughly 2-4" in length. We asked the participants to act out the scenarios with these figurines and took notes and pictures (when possible) to document the sessions for analysis.

Participants

• 26-year-old man (remote worker)
• 26-year-old woman (remote worker)
• 30-year-old man (remote worker)
• 27-year-old man (phd student)