Research
We created a persona with the directive of building for a niche market. This was compared to the example of the diving watch – it was created for divers, but used by many non-divers because they liked it and it fit their needs (even though they were outside the target niche).
Developing the Persona
For the purposes of demonstrating the potential of these products, we needed someone working simultaneously with long and short timelines (right now vs 5 months from now)
We also needed to match BlackBerry's target demographic. This person is young, self-determined, creates their own career and life path, etc. We came up with the persona of a band manager: Celeste.
We researched on forums and in interviews with similar careers, found what daily tasks were, and mapped the typical tasks that a person with this career would do.
Brainstorming Interactions
For a more narrative presentation experience, we condensed the many weeks worth of tasks that Celeste would do into a single day, and found common pain points, dependent on the technology she was using. In defining this “day in the life” for Celeste, we made sure to include a few small crises she would need to deal with, so we could demonstrate how her use of this specific technology would save the day.
We had brainstormed a number of interactions, but we wanted to make sure we demonstrated a variety of situations. To analyze this, I created a quadrant map of: "my screens"/"our screens" (exploring technology ownership and how public we expect our screens to be) and "screen to screen"/"screen and screen" (determining the type of interactions with other people).
Refining Interactions
The final presentation consisted of 6 primary interactions (with some micro-interactions thrown in). Each of us completed storyboarding, did paper prototyping together, then each created animations in After Effects for our respective interactions.
Smart Contacts
Smart contacts provides contextual information when a user is on a phone call, bringing up information about the person on the other end of the phone.
Funds Transfer
Simplifying the transfer of money in social situations.
Finale
The final part of this project was to assemble the research, persona creation, interaction development, and interaction demonstrations, and fly to Waterloo, Ontario to present to BlackBerry's design team.
