Smart Design
Overview:
During my experience as a Design Researcher at Smart Design I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Strategy & Industrial Design teams on 2 projects:
1) Conducting qualitative user research to uncover how personalized experiences are curated in daily user interactions with Pixel mobile phones
2) Discovering post-pandemic cleaning habits for a multinational cleaning company in order to predict consumer trends for the future of home and office sanitization
Team: Working under Strategy lead alongside two industrial designers, one interaction designer, and one visual designer
Role: Design Research internship - Design Strategy: Summer 2022
Duration: 3 months
Tools: Miro, Figma, Procreate, Otter
Responsibilities:
Leading in-depth interviews
Synthesizing research findings
Facilitating and participating in ideation workshop
Sketching and ideating early stage concepts
Recuiting and managing research participants
Creating research screeners and discussion guides
Included below are a few snapshots of my contributions to two projects at Smart Design. For more detail on my design research process & experience, please feel free to reach out to chat at: madelynwyner@gmail.com or find me on LinkedIn here.
Synthesizing research findings
As part of the Google Pixel effort to redefine premium, the team came to Smart Design seeking to learn how to craft more human, personal, and adaptive Pixel experiences. I worked to gain insight into Pixel owner customization mindsets and behaviors, both on their phones and within their physical spaces at home, to distill user a deep understanding of what makes something feel truly personal
The Project
My Impact
Leading research synthesis for the frequency of users' activity patterns on their phones over time, I was able to help the team map behaviors into user typologies, and translate how these specific users interact with their phones over the years of phone ownership
Activity Count: Phone Tweaks Over Time
Synthesis from these findings helped not only in learning about functional/aesthetic preferences and refreshing habits, but also allowed us to have a better understanding on the threshold where a level of customization is reached that makes the device feel like one's own
Concept iteration
Shifting focus into physical product design, we next collaborated with a large multinational cleaning company, to assess what the near future looks like in terms of defining new post-Covid cleaning standards. Through leading in-depth interviews, planning and participating in a client ideation workshop, and refining concepts for user testing, I was able to assist the Smart Design team in ascertaining changing standards in terms of what makes people confident that a surface is truly clean
Client Ideation Workshop
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Through rapid concept generation activities with the client and in-house team, we were able to aggregate major themes that appeared from early stage research, and to align on problem areas to tackle moving forward with the project
We then revisited these early-stage concepts to present refined sketches in the next phase of in-depth interviews. Here we co-designed these concepts with end-users, incorporating activities such as the one below to gauge their opinions and see where we could improve
