Chrysanthemum's Interview Documentation

Team Chrysanthemum (Kenneth, Lenora, Niki) visited Achieva, a group home for individuals with disabilities in the West View neighborhood north of Pittsburgh, on Wednesday, March 12th. Our purpose was to interview our design client in order to gather sufficient information about the client’s life to identify a need that could possibly be resolved with a technological solution. We conducted a 20-30 minute interview with Maura, our design client, on the daily workings of her life and what parts of her life that could be made more convenient in the context of her physical disability that requires her to navigate with a mobility chair.   

• Interview Planning/Things to Remember:

  • Reminders:

    • Record conversation for reference  

    • Have one person take notes/take pictures

    • Give contact information to client 

    • If client goes off track or on a tangent, remember to bring them back on track 

      • “That is very interesting, but we have limited time at hand so I want to bring us back to the questions at hand” 

    • Asking for a tour of their rooms or living space to understand context 

• Introduction/icebreaker: (Some options, pick a few)

  • Quick round of introductions from all students: 

    • Major/class year

    • Add a little tid-bit about yourself, for example answering “what’s your favorite part about living in Pittsburgh?” 

  • What are you most looking forward to during this process/collaboration? 

    • Just out of curiosity, what made you want to volunteer for this project with us? 

  • What’s your favorite part about living in Pittsburgh?

  • What’s a surprising fact about you that someone might not expect?

  • How involved would you like to be in this process?

• Project Goals: *This part can be read verbatim* 

  • General script:

    • Our goal is to build some sort of prototype of useful devices to assist or help you in any way that would address a need or issue! It does not have to be useful to a wide audience of people since our goal is just to design for you alone, to address your specific needs. We just want to reiterate that we are not professionals who are experienced in making any polished products that will be sold commercially. You can think of this device as a “convenience machine”, one that reduces one of the little annoyances we all have. 

  • We are:

    • Trying to build prototype useful devices

    • Engaging in an iterative design process, including gathering formative feedback around the midpoint of the process

    • Taking about seven weeks to go from this meeting to a reasonably high-fidelity final product

    • Documenting our process

  • We are not:

    • Professional technologists who are experienced in making polished products

    • Planning to build something that will be sold commercially

    • Constrained by any practicality outside of usefulness to the person we’re designing for

    • Likely to invent a totally novel piece of electronics (we combine many existing available components in new ways, but don’t make components)

• Timeline of process:

  • General script:

    • Just to give a quick overview of the project’s timeline, we are approximately spending seven weeks from this meeting to create a reasonably high-fidelity final product for you.  

  • Our preliminary sketches (which will show several different options) are due: This Monday, 3/17

  • Our Prototype is due: 3/31

  • The final project will be shown: 4/23

• Need-finding:

  • Notes to consider during conversation:

    • Think of this as making a “convenience machine”, one that reduces one of the little annoyances we all have, maybe call it a “gadget”? Language is important.

    • Narrow the scope of what “problem” means so that the client doesn’t get overwhelmed

  • Things to do:

    • Can you demonstrate/mime some tasks you do every day?

    • Ask ethnographic questions: “why is this important to you?”

    • Show client sketches

  • Questions to ask:

    • Can you think of something that brings you joy? Is there some way it might be improved?

    • Are there any activities in your daily life that are difficult for you?

    • If you think about this week, was there anything you struggled with?

    • What is something creative that you love doing?

    • Could you walk us through your routine when you get up/cook/do work

    • Could you demonstrate how the activity has been difficult for you?

    • What kinds of improvements are you hoping to obtain?

  • Follow up questions (to ask when they give us ideas):

    • Shape/form of the device (maybe show rough sketches) 

    • Where does this device want to live? Where might it plug in to power, etc (logistics of their space)

    • Preferred shapes, colors etc…

• Concluding:

  • “Thank you for your time today!”

  • Reiterate the overall project schedule if you feel it would be necessary to clarify before leaving.

    •  **Remember to give them our contact info**

During our meeting, we learned a lot about Maura’s life and what she enjoys. We began in the living room where we introduced ourselves to her, and then she guided us to her bedroom for the main conversation. Maura is a wheelchair user, and we noticed while she was navigating with us through the house that the wheel of her chair often becomes stuck or caught around corners or in narrow hallways. During our conversation, Maura pointed this out as well, and requested that we make her a gadget that can help alert her when she’s going to run into something. While it seemed like this idea would improve Maura’s life the most, we continued to question her about other aspects of her life so that we had multiple ideas to iterate on later.

As our conversation continued, we learned more about Maura’s daily life, like where she works, what time she wakes up, and what kinds of activities she likes to do. She mentioned that when she’s at work, she struggles with using the restroom because there’s no way to indicate to someone outside that she’s finished. We discussed possible solutions to this, like an easy to reach button that could indicate to someone outside that she’s ready. We struggled a bit with finding other ideas/problems we could solve, but in the last few minutes of the meeting her aide came in and suggested that she could use some help with morning reminders.

Maura was clearly much more interested in a solution for her wheelchair problem than anything else, and the conversation kept returning to her concerns about her feet and chair. We did our best to get a good variation of ideas, but our team generally agreed with Maura that the wheelchair issue is something she needs a solution to, and it seemed like something within our scope.

One thing that we overlooked and forgot to do was briefly conduct an ice breaker session and introduce ourselves in a more personal manner outside of just introducing our names. 

The meeting was generally smooth and followed the agenda in the sense that we successfully answered all the questions that we planned to ask and Maura was engaged with us for the entire process. The conversations were smooth since Maura was quite receptive with us, and she provided additional details in her answers that made it easy to create more conversational threads to further inquire about her life and interests. One aspect that made conversing with Maura slightly difficult was conducting the interview in the same room as another group, which made it slightly distracting since the room was quite small and there were two different conservations going on among 8 people in a small enclosure. 

What we would want to do differently next time is to spend more time talking to Maura since we only had around 20-30 minutes to converse with her. Additionally, it would have been useful to spend more time observing and having Maura demonstrate how she goes about her daily life and perform tasks while navigating with her mobility chair but given the time constraint we could only see how Maura navigates through the hallway from the living room to her room which is only a small section of the house. We wished we could have more time to flesh out our ideas towards the end of the meeting, since we could only create a brief overview of possible ideas that could satisfy Maura’s needs without gaining much key details.