SPRINT Ideation
Independent Project
The Idea
SPRINT Ideating is a passion project that I started in September 2022. The main idea of the project is to gamify the design thinking process in a way that is accessible to players that are unfamiliar to UX. This project first came to me from personal experience as I struggled so often to explain to my own family what I do for a living.
This is my beautiful 80 year old Nona Yolanda. She is one of the most important people in my life, but it is hard for me to explain to her what I do, as she is not familiar with the internet, let alone what UX or UI are. She was my original inspiration for this project.
The project began with a general analysis on how desirable, feasible, and viable the project was.
3 Main Goals
Gamify the UX ideation process.
Help grow and provide examples of ideation skills.
Grow users’ critical thinking as designers.
Competing
The amazing Dr. Stephen Fernandez was able to help me branch out and share the idea to a wider audience--the catch being the audience's lack of UX knowledge. When nominated to participate in the Academic Creative and Engaged Research or ACERS competition in March 2023, I jumped at the opportunity because it would allow me to test the idea on an academic but non-UX audience.
This video outlines the overall benefits of the game, also giving me a test run on accessible and user-friendly language for the future of the project. The video was reviewed with over 10 people who knew next to nothing about UX before being uploaded for the competition, allowing me to ensure that it was easily digestible and engaging.
The idea became a topic of conversation, intriguing many minds due to the essential base concepts and potential the game holds. This brought it to the finals, as well as a second overall! Being a second year student and receiving this amazing reward after being completely independent on the project was extremely rewarding!
Strategic Plan
As someone who values time put toward a project and is passionate about their ideas, I put together a strategic plan for the year, sticking to the outline I set for myself while also balancing a full time course load and a job.
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While GANTT and SWOT analysis are more of a business-oriented approach, I deemed them extremely important to my success with this project. They allowed me to approach the idea from different angles and evaluate important oncoming challenges as well as strengths for the project.
User Research
There are several users I wanted to engage in my research process prior to the project planning. This includes current UX students who are newer to the process as well as people with little-to-no UX knowledge. Along with this, gaining insights from industry professionals in my network is extremely important. These three areas of people provide insight on how non-UX people's mental mapping works, how new UX designers are struggling and how people who have been in the industry for years view the processes, allowing me to make the game more accurate in nature!
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My user research to better develop the game is currently still in progress.
Development
The game has gone through a few different iterations in the development area with varying features, although it is important that these features are properly put together to best help the user's experience with the game.
There are many possibilities to how the game can be structured in a realistic and fun setting. With these two concepts in mind, I am trying to be sure that there isn't a significant tradeoff between one and the other.
Adaptability
This game has plenty of potential for adaptability into a corporate tool setting and could be used for things like interviews and recruitment to see how designers can problem-solve quickly and efficiently. It can be developed to be fun and playful, or to be serious and help tackle real world issues. These are all considerations that I have in the development process and I will be proud to share when the time comes to have the game played by various audiences. I look forward to future planned workshops, focus groups, and other testing practices in order to see the game and it's potential in-action.