Little Black Pearl
May 2018 • Team Project for Design Ethnography
Purpose: Little Black Pearl (LBP) students and community members come from all over the city and Chicagoland areas to attend classes, workshops, and events. For some students, current commute time to LBP can take over an hour and involve multiple forms of transportation.
With a fleet of cars being donated by MINI USA., students will soon have access to an easier form of transportation, as well as a safer and shorter commute to and from LBP.
The client was interested in understanding the following:
How can these cars best be utilized to service the LBP community?
What would the experience of commuting in a LBP Mini vehicle look like for the students?
Method: Ethnographic Research (in field observations and interviews)
Tools: NVivo, Sketch, Indesign
Full Report: Little Black Pearl Design Research
—What We Did—
To better understand how the new fleet of cars could be utilized to service Little Black Pearl community, we needed to first learn more about the LBP community and identify challenges and opportunities faced by members of the community.
To achieve this, we utilized the following methods to gather information on LBP students, staff, and parents:
A total of 20 hours were spent conducting observations, interviews, and meetings with the LBP community
Observed student workshops that were taking place at LBP
3 meetings with staff members
7 interviews (2 parents, 2 students, 1 teacher, and 2 staff members)
Detailed field notes (thick descriptions) were taken during the field observations
280 codes were created when transcribing field notes and interviews
—What We Found—
The following categories were uncovered from grouping the codes from the meetings, interviews, and observation.
The following themes were then identified from the categories
Theme 1: Students Commute to and from LBP
“We have students in the suburbs that take a 30 minute metra ride and a bus, we have students that walk or are transported by others.”
We found that students commute to and from LBP via different forms of transportation (bus, car, train, walk, and guardian pick-up). Many students also experience a very lengthy commute.
Theme 2: Parent’s Expectations
Parents want to know that their children are able to get to and from school safely. They also want to know how their children are doing in school.
“Hopefully they get transportation for her, through the Uber or ride-sharing or whatever else they can get…cause we live on the other side of town.”
Theme 3: The Barriers in Student Development
“They are at risk from low-income communities. We have to meet them emotionally and socially where they are before we can meet them on an academic level.”
Lower-income students have to meet other goals before academic goals can be met. Lack of transportation and trust can also impact students’ attendances.
—Design Principles—
From the themes and insights, the team came together to develop a set of design principles that would help guide our proposed solution.
—Design Concept—
A mobile application that facilitates conversation and builds community while also providing a ride-share program specifically for Little Black Pearl students.
—Ideation & Deliverables—
Our design process started with brainstorming and sketches and then moved onto personas and experience maps. Once we had a solid direction of where we were going to take the application we started wireframes.
Personas
We created personas to help drive design decisions and give the team a shared understanding of our users.
Experience Maps
Current Experience Map
The data from the student interviews provided us with insight on what the current experience may look like for a student commuting to LBP.
Solution Based Experience Map
We created a journey map to demonstrate a student’s experience through their entire commute to school.
Solution Based Experience Map
We created a journey map to demonstrate a student’s commute experience to their home from LBP.
Note: Please visit pages 32-54 of the full report to see wireframes and prototype.
—Limitations—
Participants
It would have been ideal to have a greater variety of student and parent participants. Only one parent currently had a child enrolled in LBP.
No corporate partners were able to participate.
Comparative Analysis
Due to our focus shifting during design sprints, we were only able to conduct a comparative analysis on student portfolio applications. Given more time we would like to explore more ride-share options for LBP.
Prototype
We were unable to create parent or corporate partner hi-fidelity mockups due to the time constraints of the design process.
Usability Study
We were unable to conduct any usability tests on the prototype due to time constraints with the data analysis portion of the project.
Considerations for next steps:
Interview corporate partners to understand how they interact with students
Run a usability test with students and drivers on our hi-fi prototype
Learn more about how students communicate, the language they use to generate more determined texts and diversity the feedback.
Knowing a fact about a person is a good way to start a conversation, but we want to learn more about different methods to facilitate groups conversation that would include the driver and other students.