Challenge:  I was working on a project to design a table-top extension to enable users to have a space for  putting away things they didn’t actively want to use off their desk. I created a prototype that  would attach onto most desks with a clamp and would give a long adjustable arm for the user  with a large flat surface for placing objects like books, laptops and tablets. The design of the  prototype was informed by research and surveys – so expectations were that the design should  indeed improve user experience.

Selection:  However, this had to be tested out and while I had shown potential users drawings and use- case scenarios for the product, a true test of the products worth would be when the user would  be able to interact with the product and intuitively understand how to use it and figure out its  benefits. Because I had a working prototype, the approach I used to test the design was  obviously, the learning launch. The prototype was a result of a couple of months of research  and would reveal any assumptions or mistakes in my previous work, giving me a chance to fix  the final designs as the deadline for a commercially viable design came closer.

Application:  I reached out to random volunteers from our target market and requested them to test out my  prototype. I tried my best to keep the set of volunteers as broad as possible, with different  interests in changing their approach to working on their desks, and in trying out a new product. I  had a document of set questions that I would ask depending on their interests and answers to  other questions during the interaction. These questions were based off of our design’s end  goals and so tested whether those goals were met or not. For example, because I wanted the  product to be attractive and intuitive once a user sees it on a store shelf, I allowed the test users  to interact with the product and guess on their own what the purpose of the design was.

Insight:  The application, was fairly effective and revealed many insights to which I was not initially  completely aware. I realized that the design’s strength was not in how much mass it could lift  (because this had been a factor that required quite a bit of work to achieve success in), but  about how intuitively the user could use the product. In fact, intuitiveness was one of the major  factors that inspired the design. The results of the tests were pretty positive and indicated that  the initial research that the current prototype had been backed by proved to be rather effective.

Approach:   However, I still feel that having more test users for the learning launch would have enabled me  to get clearer insights on how the target market will react to the product. In the current stage,  most of my test users belonged to the same ethnic group and had a similar socio-economic  background – maybe I could have also tested the design with users that lied in the lowest and  highest percentiles of our user-interest expectations. Since this was an academic project,  without a strong intention on actually mass producing the product, it served to be a very  insightful experience not only teaching me a lot of other soft skills that I may have not learnt had  I just trusted that my initial research would work.

