Parents/ guardians who bring kids to the playground
Kids who play in the playground
Outdoor activities such as summer camp are cancelled during COVID-19. Parents struggled to find alternative options for kids to spend time outdoors. Bringing kids to the playground is one of the most affordable choices. However, parents found that it’s difficult to maintain a safe distance between kids at the playground, especially when playgrounds get busy.
Therefore, we came up with a solution that helps parents or guardians by providing them the option to explore more locations where physical distancing is possible.
How might we create safer experiences for families in the playground during & post-pandemic?
We used an affinity diagram to categorize our ideas into 3 themes. They were outdoor, virtual and miscellaneous. We eliminated some topics as we agreed that the scope might be too big or take longer as the pandemic is still on-going.
Furthermore, we did another affinity diagram to break down into specific settings such as stores, parks, playground, transit centre, and virtual.
In the end, we picked the playground as our main theme because we think this is an interesting idea to explore. We also wanted to focus on a smaller area as we think it might be too time-consuming if we choose a bigger area like parks.
At the end of the affinity diagram session, we didn't finalize what kind of HMW question would be under playground circumstance yet as we still wanted to explore our users' problems through our user research.
We knew that we would work on our project around the playground, so we wanted to have parents/guardians for our target audience as they are the ones who assess their own decisions of bringing the kids to the playground.
Our research goal is to understand behaviours/ perceptions of parents taking kids to playground in Alberta & BC before and during the pandemic, as well as their expectations regarding the new normal (before vaccine is available)
We chose to conduct a survey first as it was the safest choice to gather users' insights during the lockdown.
We thought that the survey might not provide enough information, so we also did observations at several playground locations in Alberta & BC.
After gathering the user insights through both survey & observation, we had a difficult time drawing the users' behavioural pattern as the results were somewhat conflicted.
As a result, we conducted field interviews at playgrounds (at a safe distance) to provide us better understanding.
This is where my responsible part is started. Despite some of the results being conflicted, I used these information to draw personas into 3 different groups of parents/guardians.
We chose to work with the second persona. We agreed that working with this persona would benefit the remaining personas.
After choosing the persona to work with, I created an empathy map.
I also created a journey map. The map illustrated the needs & opportunities for us to come up with our HMW question.
We evaluated what does “safer experiences” mean to the users. We found that their safer experiences mean:
Each of us were given 1 minute to come up with many possible ideas under the "safer experiences" theme.
After a discussion, we each picked favourite ideas & categorized into 5 main topics through a card sorting as there were a lot of ideas.
We decided to choose the "tracking/ controlling playground use" theme as we wanted to invent a product that can be used after the arrival of the vaccines.
Our final solution is to create a mobile application that displays the local playgrounds as well as its status on how busy each playground is.
We also proposed the idea of retrieving live playground data. Our industrial designer found TI mmwave sensor technology, a people counting technology for the sensor pole.
Prior to discovering the people counting technology, we chose CCTV technology as a part of our final product. However, because of the privacy issue, we decided to drop the CCTV idea. As a result, we proceeded with the sensor pole as the final product, along with the mobile application.
The mood board is colourful, so I took this opportunity to explore different colour palettes for the logos.
Logo #1
Logo #2
Logo #3
Logo #4
We all voted for the logo#4 for the final design. However, our team suggested that I should revisit the colour palette as they think the palette was too soft.
After revisiting & presenting the new palettes to the team, we chose the #3 colour palette as the final palette. Everyone agreed that bright orange & mint green hinted at the "outdoor", "playful"& "summer" vibes.
