Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry
Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry are two important concepts that go hand in hand with each other in the school of IAS. Throughout the time being here, I needed to do interdisciplinary research, meaning I had to go through a systematic investigation covering multiple areas of knowledge that I would not be familiar with before. I needed to evaluate and test what the student demographic wanted under a multitude of different projects. The concept of Inquiry is asking important questions of what certain people actually want, then the concept of research is actually going out into the field and finding those answers. I believe I did these two things within a specific artifact which was my redesign of the Roku home screen.
The project itself was quite a simple one assigned by Professor Vu, ‘how can we as designers improve Smart TVs’? That’s pretty much all we got as a prompt, and were then put in small groups to brainstorm and help each other within the research process.
To start things off in the design process, us designers have to inquire what the users actually want (not just what we think users want). In this context, what would users want to get out of a redesign of the Roku home screen. We brainstormed important inquiries that would lead us down a solid research path: What can be improved on? What’s not there that you wish was? We went out into the field to actually get these answers. A whole user test with an actual Roku smart tv was necessary in order to see how the user interacts with this smart device. For the test, we recruited a few students from around campus at random and let them run through setting up the Roku Smart TV while they spoke aloud their thoughts on what they were thinking when they were setting up the smart tv. Once, they successfully set up the Smart Television, we asked how it went and what they liked and didn’t like. For the most part, they didn’t have any extreme criticism of the home screen in its current state. They did mention how certain features were a bit hard to find, like how to install any new applications, and how to find the search bar. They also noted that it lacked a lot of accessibility setup features, which led me to researching that.
Although the students we tested had a lot of good input into how we should go about improving Roku’s home screen, my professor thought it would be even more beneficial to not only create a home screen that was easier to use for the average consumer, but for those who generally had a hard time setting up a smart television. I instantly thought of those who were visually impaired, or elderly. I knew for a fact that the Roku didn’t accommodate those demographics when it came to setting up their product. I went on a research journey on which usability features a lot of digital programs use that would generally be beneficial to those with those ailments. I found that the contrast, closed captions, larger icons, and on screen tutorials were the best way of assisting the elderly and visually impaired. So, I added those ideas into my prototype.
Within this project, I was able to use both the idea of Inquiry as well as Research. In order to start off the whole design process, I had to actually inquire what the average person would want out of a redesign of a beloved item. Once I wrote down and collected all of those questions I had, I actually had to find the answer to them. I set up a user test as well as an extended research journey into accessibility of the visually impaired. All of this was to ensure I created a custom and user friendly experience for everyone trying to use the Roku Smart Television.