Week 1
Class Exercise: Toast Storyboard
For this exercise we watched a TED talk on the importance of telling a story through storyboarding, and spent a few minutes trying to narrate the steps of how to make toast. The class discussion brought up a few interesting perspectives, such as how many or little frames some people had and the aspect of putting the human element in the drawings such as hands or emotions.
We then went into our project groups to compare and create a new storyboard with everyone, resulting in a more effective narrative.
Individual Storyboard
For this assignment, we chose two solutions from project 1 individually and created storyboards for them. My favourite ones are the shopping list/receipt scanning one where the seniors can upload their list and automatically select options, and the long-term volunteer program where seniors and youth get paired up to help with groceries and make friends.
For the shopping list one, I wanted to include context and the story that comes before using the application through showing emotions and how the service was presented to them at a time of convenience.
As for the volunteer program, I wanted to show the potential struggles that seniors went through before using the service, which was not being able to ask their caregiver for help whenever they need. The volunteer program allows her to ask for help anytime.
Our group then got together and took notes on everyone’s storyboard to find out our area of focus:
Criteria:
- Feasibility
- Impact
Discussion:
- More personalized features (having food more tailored to the elder’s needs)
- Not adding more technology for seniors
- Feasibility
- Volunteer program/video call emphasizes human experience
- Pick out own produce/remove things makes it easier
- Volunteer program-easiest to achieve
- Other technologies take time to develop especially during covid
- Appreciate human interaction during covid if a volunteer comes often
- Video calling is not far off from current services on these online shopping platforms
- Facetime or call is convenient and accessible
- How does the user get to the certain feature
- How does a senior get to the program to access a volunteer
- Facetime can be a main feature of that app/website
- Clubhouse: group of volunteers that are part of a program, whoever is available can answer calls
- A group of few seniors and few volunteers can help each other (adopt a family:))
- Volunteer program also eliminates the extra costs of delivery service
- What can the volunteers get out of it
- Volunteers block out time slots
- Have a set schedule that works for both volunteers and seniors (ex. Every Saturday 10–4)
Our joint storyboard for the volunteer program:
TED talk: How Great Leaders Inspire Action
From the TED talk given by Simon Sinek, I was very intrigued by his argument around how the audience is often attracted not by what or how you do it, but by why you do it. Thinking about this really helped me realize that in order to create a product that senior would actually use, we would need to place the roots of our thinking to the “why’s”, such as why the seniors want social interaction, why they would rather choose in-person grocery shopping instead of online, etc.
Thinking about this as a group helped us narrow down the aspects of in-person grocery shopping that they are missing in the service, such as social interaction and lack of control over the selection of groceries, which we will try to solve in our solution.
Week 2
Group Meeting: Luma Template
This exercise really helped me think through everything more realistically through the steps and understand all the possible downfalls of the solution. We named our service the Care Community because we wanted to create a group of seniors and volunteers that lived close by to create an opportunity for more friendships and availabilities.
Class Exercise: In-person Chalk Drawing
For this class I was able to see everyone for the first time in person. I worked with Carolyn and Mohammed in person and Amy and Mina over the phone to brainstorm poster design ideas. We came up with the idea to have an enlarged phone with either text messages or the volunteer pop out, with the senior holding the phone and interacting. We thought this fit the hybrid qualities of the volunteer program, with half of the information in the phone and half outside. We also changed our name to a more fitting one, “Grocery Buddies”, to seem more playful and specific.
Week 3
Group Meetup: Poster Design and Role Assignment
This week we met in and out of class to flush out the rough draft of the poster, storyboard, and presentation. We first worked with the layout of the storyboard before considerations of color, type hierarchy, and font.
We then went through a few iterations, incorporating the same colors that we used for project one presentation and playing around with title layouts. We also decided to break up the context, problem, and solution paragraphs throughout the page and match them up with the storyboard.
For the presentation slides, we decided it would be best to directly use parts of the poster through our explanations so our points are made very clear. So we matched up the script with different sections of the poster and added additional slides for the parts that need more visuals.
Final Poster
Overall we got a lot of good feedback from the final review from the guest critic. I was glad when she responded that this program would be very feasible to implement in current times.
