(Almost) Done!
Team Patent Pending powering through the last stretch of the spring semester
Welcome back! The past couple of weeks have flown by so quickly and we can’t believe it is already week 11! This 2-week sprint for Team Patent Pending is all about wrapping up with synthesizing our research that we have been conducting throughout the semester and taking the insights we uncovered to help us move further into prototyping the future state of digital TV. After all, this semester only has three weeks left and we can’t wait to show you what we have learned in our next Medium post!
The Contextual Inquiry Chronicles (Epilogue)
We have officially wrapped up our contextual inquiry interviews and finished synthesizing the qualitative data. We have a total of 11 participants and the data we gathered…is a lot. But nothing is more exciting than affinitizing, right? Yes, you heard it right. We did another round of affinity diagramming! Since last time we used this method to synthesize data of our pretotype (the activity where participants had a TV that moves with them), we have learned so much that this time, the process went much more smoothly.
After 9 hours of disagreeing and agreeing with each other (with some scheduled coffee breaks in between where we chatted over our team’s favorite coffee, the Divya Classic*), we learned these:
*The Divya Classic: Venti Salted Caramel Cold Brew from Starbucks
People want to “mold” the content they capture to present their stories for certain audiences.
In our contextual inquiries, we found that many participants love to capture moments with their tech devices, however, fewer are willing to post and share the content with the public on their social media, and various types of barriers are preventing them from creating these content, such as self-presentation, impression management, content appealingness…These findings are interesting to us because they suggest that wherever users want to share stories on social media, they subconsciously go through a filtering process where they filter out the things they don’t want people to see. If in the future, people are able to combine and change the content based on who they target to create the idealized image of themselves for the target audience, more and more people will be able to share their stories with other people.
Imagine you are at a wild drinking party and you really want to share this good time with other people on social media, but afraid that this content will be seen by your mom or future colleagues. If a synthetic content generator can help you filter out the drinking part and only post the good times, wouldn’t it be great?!
People want to use content capturing to escape from current reality by reflecting or re-experiencing their past.
Aside from sharing on social media, another reason that people love to capture content is that they can look back to those moments whenever they can. This is another theme that emerged in our synthesizing session: people have the tendency to seek distraction and relief from their realities by re-experiencing their past. They use escapism as a coping mechanism and relive their past memories because they are oftentimes not satisfied with their present. Re-experiencing the old moments can temporarily transport them to another place and hence make them happier. Later in the week when we were synthesizing the data from our Conceptual Prototype, we actually found that nostalgia is a common theme. This area is also where synthetic content can come into play. We are thinking about ways of how we can help people gather nostalgic memories that would make them happy.
People are willing to give up their individual viewing experience for the collective viewing experience (based on the mood/vibe/energy).
In our contextual inquiry interviews, we found that generally when there are people around, participants are cognizant of other people’s feelings and experiences. Participants want to empathize with the people around them because they want them to have a good collective viewing experience. Wait, isn’t this one of the insights we came up with for our Pretotype Research? It is great to see that our insights from different studies are starting to emerge. However, this time we took a step further with the insight. People want to have a shared viewing experience because they are empathetic and are willing to sacrifice their individual viewing experience for the collective one.
There are also some opportunity spaces in this area. Synthetic content can be used to enhance or manipulate the collective viewing experience. Imagine you are with a group of friends who love to watch horror movies and you are the only one who never watched one. One day you are going with them for a horror movie night and don’t need to cover your eyes when scary scenes happen because the scary parts of the content are filtered out just for your viewing experience.
People want to be entertained and have their attention partially occupied through content as they perform uninteresting or absent-minded tasks.
In our pretotype insights, we found that people choose to watch TV because they can easily switch their attention to and from other tasks. People want to exercise and listen to music, walk and listen to podcasts, cook, and watch a Netflix show, because when performing absent-minded tasks, people want to be entertained. When in multitasking experiences like this, people’s attention is constantly partially occupied through content, and their level of attention also fluctuates.
That being said, there is a need for content to adjust based on the current cognitive load. For example, when you are working on a project that requires less concentration so you choose to listen to some pop music while doing it. However, you suddenly realized some sections in the project are not right and need correction so you start to concentrate on the project more. The pop music at the time will be changed to some lo-fi and calming music that would enhance your concentration and help with your productivity.
Now, after tackling the data from our Contextual Inquiries, we started to look at data from the other primary research and our conceptual prototype.
The Diary Study Saga (Second Epilogue)
This week, we have finally wrapped up synthesizing data for our diary studies! After all the debriefs, we synthesized data using a method called Experience Diagramming and the template from Luma Institute. We each started mapping out one to two participants’ 24 hours journey using the data they entered every day. We created two diagrams for each participant, one explaining their interactions by illustrating who is involved, where they are and with what digital devices or content, the other one focusing on their emotions throughout these activities during the day.
After putting up 16 diagrams (8 participants, 2 diagrams each) on the Figma board and looking at them together, we came to realize that although our participants are from four different time zones all across the world, they share lots of similar routines, like exercising or walking the dog in the morning, listening to music while working, winding down a busy day by cooking dinner and watching with families or friends… We think these routines we uncovered validated a lot of the insights we generated from our primary research and they will help us with ideation and prototyping in the upcoming summer.
The Adventures of Conceptual Prototyping (Final Chapter)
We finished all of our conceptual prototyping sessions this week! We had four group sessions and each group had at least three members playing the game. We are grateful that all of our participants were so invested in the game, being as engaging and helpful as they can. They came up with interesting ideas about the future of content, actively involved in discussing and offering thoughts on the others’ ideas. Thanks to them, many insightful conversations have emerged from these sessions. We are still in the process of organizing the data, but stay tuned, we will report back with some exciting insights!
This sprint has definitely been one of the most challenging weeks, because the clock is ticking, with just one more sprint, we will be finishing our first semester of Capstone. In order to get ready for our last Sprint, we have tried to be as nimble as we can with gathering and synthesizing data, but this challenging time also made our bonds as teammates stronger. We even assigned every team member to do the Briggs and Myers personality test as well as the Love Language Quiz in order to learn about each other more.
What? You want the results? Hmmm.. those are kept confidential at the moment. But one thing for sure is that you are definitely watching a group of people who love to hear positive affirmations…
Oh, by the way, our team movie night was a big success as well! We had a great time watching some of the Black Mirror episodes and our next step is to make the team trip to the Zoo!
Signing off,
Team Patent Pending
