ADS 300, UX Design Methods, Spring 2022
Tuesday / Thursday @ 4:00-5:15pm
Marvin 216B
Matt Kirkland / mattk@ku.edu

Your Workbench Project

Throughout the semester you're going to do some practice with some of the design methods we cover. Think of this like a picking up different tools in a workshop, and seeing what they can do.

Each week, starting in Week 3, you'll try out one of the methods we cover. We'll discuss the details in Thursday's class, and you'll have five days to put a method into practice. You'll write up some short notes about how it went, and submit them to a form. Workbench submissions are always due by 8am on Tuesday mornings.

👉 Submit Your Workbench Report here

Your Project

You'll be assigned one of four possible workbench projects. These are detailed below!

Submit Workbench Reports

Each week you'll submit short notes about your experience testing these design methods in THIS GOOGLE FORM.

What method you tried out
What I did
What I learned
What I was suprised by
What I'd do next time
And a request to upload some kind of evidence. A screenshot, a photo, whatever.

This is due by Tuesday at 8am, each week!

I'll be grading each of these almost entirely on a pass/fail basis: did you submit the form with a reasonable answer for each section? Is there enough there to convince me you actually did the thing? You'll get the points.

These workbench notes are worth half of your grade in this class. Do them! Do them on time!

The Workbench Project Briefs

There are four projects. You've been randomly assigned one of these! Refer to this brief as needed.

📚 Denote

About our Company: We're a growing media empire that represents a roster of social media influencers. We're helping these young content creators build their brands and audiences with new ways to connect - and monetize - their fans.
What do we need?: We want to build a brand-able book club app. We want each of our content creators to be able to launch their own version of Oprah's book club.
Why do we need it?: Our influences have tight communities of shared interests, but not enough ways to help build those communities together (and monetize them).
Our vision for the project: It should do normal book club things: help you find people to read with, schedule your meetings, maybe provide discussion questions? We think that there is a lot of ways a book club can be good that we can build tools for, and ways a book club can be bad that we should avoid. Each influencer should be able to pick their own books, and apply some basic branding.
Where will the project be used?: Probably: on phones? Our inluencers are heavy on IG and Tiktok, so that's where we expect usage.
Our target audience: Probably mostly women, 20-35yo.

🚙 Detail

About our Company: We're a growing mobile car detailing service. You book a service through us, and we come out to wherever you are to detail your car. Like a car wash, you can pick a level of service (basic, plus, extra, etc). We started in KC and we're expanding to other mid-market cities in the midwest.
What do we need?: We need a new app that helps our detailer technicians do a good job.
Why do we need it?: We're expanding our sales area and we need to be able to help our techs do a good job: consistently, on time, and with less training and hand-holding. We're hiring fast and we need to keep our customer service at a high level.
Our vision for the project: This app should help our technicians: find their next job, get there on time, perform the correct services, and check out. The services should have step-by-step instructions and the technician should be able to check off each step to verify they did the right work.
Where will the project be used?: Our techs will use this on their personal phones, but they will be working wherever cars are parked: driveways, parking garages, parking lots. Usually outdoors, in the elements.
Our target audience: Most of our techs are male, 20-30yo.

🔌 Decarb

About our Company: We're a nonprofit advocacy group that is helping people get off fossil fuels while keeping their comfortable American lifestyle. We call this: gentle decarbonization.
What do we need?: We need a tool that will help people figure out where they can replace fossil fuels in their life with clean energy replacements. In most cases that's just replacing gas-powered stuff with electric stuff. Users should be able to sign up, have a profile, mark off their progress in some way. Also we should harvest their email addresses.
Why do we need it?: Because we're not going to reuse-reduce-recycle our way out of the climate crisis. We have more and more clean electricity every year, and almost everything in your life could run on electricity instead of fossil fuels: heating your house, cooking your dinner, driving your car. We need to convince people and help them make this transition without giving up their lifestyle comforts.
Our vision for the project: The new tool is a website (we think?) that works as both education and a workbook. The user can build out their fossil-fuel lifestyle in some way, and then we can help them check off replacing their fossil fuel-powered stuff with electric stuff. This is a pretty fuzzy vision!
Where will the project be used?: Probably on computers, inside private homes?
Our target audience: US Homeowners, likely ones that already lean a little environmentally minded.

💀 Death

About our Company: We're a startup of young lawyers. We cut our teeth doing estate and end-of-life planning for old folks, and now we want to launch a new business convincing young people to get their ish together.
What do we need?: We need an online tool that is both advocacy and workbook: users can sign up, make progress on preparing for end-of-life stuff.
Why do we need it?: Planning for your eventual demise is a way to take care of the people you leave behind, and young people just don't do it. We want to expand into this blue-ocean market of younger people.
Our vision for the project: The new tool is a website (we think?) that works as both education and a workbook. The user can build some kind of basic profile, and then save their work as it helps them figure out simple wills, trusts, powers-of-attorney, that kind of thing. This is a pretty fuzzy vision! We of course also want to harvest their data and will upsell them on personalized services if they need them.
Where will the project be used?: Probably on computers, inside private homes?
Our target audience: Young professionals, 25-35 yo.