ABOUT US

Hello!

We are a group of four students at the University of Washington. In Winter 2019, we took a user-centered design course (HCDE 318) with our instructors, Leah Findlater and Bella Chiu.

Alli and Vishaka come from the Human Centered Design & Engineering department while Annie and Alex are a part of the Computer Science department. Combining our skills and experiences, we created the Experience Museum Project.

Throughout the project timeline, we had the opportunity to explore the user-centered design process. For our group, we found that this process allowed us to understand our users, create designs, and evaluate our ideas.

Although this was a project delineated by assignment deadlines for the most part, we spent a while on our user research and synthesizing the information we gained. From our interviews to our competitive analysis, we thought a lot about what type of product to implement in our problem area.

With museums, we all agreed that based on our user research and our design requirements we needed to create a museum experience that was immersive. After many deliberation sessions and pros/cons lists, this led to our idea of the tablet and pen.

As the projects went on, we really became friends through our project. In the final stretch, we got to spend hours working on our final designs as well as spend hours cooking, relaxing, and bonding over many things. As a team, we discovered a lot of shared values in our work ethic and expectations from this class. We would meet up anywhere from two to twenty hours a week working on our project until our deliverables met our expectations and we never settled for anything other than our goals. We were clear in communicating schedules and meetings. Our meetings were productive yet lots of fun and we had the utmost trust in one another to complete tasks on time and with quality.

While making our presentation, pasta, high fidelity screens, and pizza, we had a lot of fun and we are really proud of the outcome. We created a museum experience that we believe enhances the user’s knowledge and connection with art.

If we had the chance to do this project over again, we would have liked to explore form factors that did not use screen based interactions. Unfortunately based on the deliverables and the way the class was structured, it did not make sense to develop a non-screen product. Overall, we were happy with our deliverables and would not change how we went about this project.

In terms of our timing, we would have liked to do more usability testing with our wireframes. In the future, we would like to design and iterate on the physical form of the tablet and pen.

We hope you enjoyed learning about art from our designs and our process! (Or have gotten to think about how you can better interact with art!)



Sincerely,
Team EMP