Research For/By Design: Part V

3 min readMay 10, 2021

Background

This post will cover part 5 out of 5 parts of this project. On this part, I was tasked to write a reflection on the overall group project and how I might move forward with the prototype based on the feedback given to me from a presentation that my team has done. Also, I would briefly write about my overall experience and how this experience will be helpful to me in the future.

Project Challenges

Before going into my self-reflection and overall experiences, I just wanted to call out a few challenges I have encountered while working on this project.

COVID-19 Restrictions
Being a completely remote team
Time Constraints on each part of the project
Coordinating with work, classwork, and timezones

Self-Reflection On Project

On each part of the project, I have already written down my reflection on the project and thought it would be a good idea to put all of them in this section.

For the first part of the project, I enjoyed starting this project; Homelessness is something that I came across every day in my community. Working on a project like this allowed me to be educated more about the Homelessness problem.

For the second part of the project, it was really exciting cause of the opportunity to do some fieldwork despite the current conditions with COVID-19. By being able to talk with the homeless did help build up more empathy. The more I work on this project, the easier it is for me to start identifying the exact issues related to homelessness.

For the third part of the project, personally was my favorite part of the design process to get with a team and start ideating different solutions. The reason being, it allows us to think of solutions that make an impact on the problem at hand. Also, it helps embrace creative thinking not only to consider business value but our customer values.

For the fourth part of the project, we were able to work on this prototype/project helped me realize that people in need of help need a helping hand to achieve their personal goals and need a little bit of money to do so. However, while working on the app, I realize a few challenges I can foresee happening, such as verifying whether an individual is homeless. This is something I would also be interested in exploring as well.

Overall Experience

With my overall experience with the project, I say it was fun and wish I had more time to work on this project. I’m happy I was able to tackle a social issue that I was passionate about; however, I would have loved the chance to test the solutions that were created and explore alternative solutions.

Ideas On Moving Forward

Based on the feedback that has been given from the presentation, a few ideas on what we would like to do for moving forward is.

Being able to establish partnerships with other homeless organizations
Being able to establish this business as a non-profit and start gathering funding to hire an engineering team to make this project feasible.
Conduct product tests on the existing prototype that we have created and iterate the designs based on feedback received from that
Create the designs and experience for the secondary persona.

Application To Future Projects

Going through this class and project was a great learning experience, and I feel very confident that I can apply what I have learned from this class. Few things that helped me be more equipped is learning various design technique such as SCAMPER method.

While going through this project, this was a great refresher and experience for anyone going into User Experience and Interface Design. Going through each part of this project can be best applied to best UX practices such as the double diamond method.