Tony's Portfolio

First, our current and previous prototypes! Then I'll show you how we arrived at these insights in detail.

or jump to the research + ideation decisions now

Based on our research and insights on the inherent value of sharing vs gifting, we created an app that would take your texts and turn them into funny, inside-joke memories in the form of memes.

Why?
Quoting a friend to turn into a funny meme or gif enhances communication by creating an artifact of the conversation. This digital artifact can then be shared with other friends, saved, or made into a physical object that serves as a permanent memento.

Sharing contains elements of gifting. When memes are combined with shared memories, they embody relationship strengthening amongst friends.

Here are the delightful reactions from the client, faculty, and students when they saw their moments on Quotr!

When inside jokes and funny, memorable moments from everyday are transformed into memes, it transforms physical happenings into a quick and easy digital artifact that strengthens relationships through laughter and joy!

Insights
After this reaction, we found people in the audience actively reminiscing about those moments while nodding and sharing giggles. In this way of sharing everyday moments, Quotr helps bring out those feelings of friendship found in giving gifts.

View Our Full Process Here!

Additionally, we created concept prototypes that were related to the physical world to better help us create a gifting to sharing experience based on our research.

View Research Decisions

Client Kickoff

We first met with our client to situate ourselves in their domain and to understand the problem space better.

Literature Review + Competitive Analysis

Why?
In addition to literature reviews, we wanted to better understand what kind of apps are out there that merges relationship building and gifting behaviors.

Guerilla Research: Come Make a V-Day Card!

We set up a booth in a cafe on CMU's campus the day before Valentines to see if people were willing to come make a spontaneous gift.

Why?
We did this to see what kind of things people will make spontaneously, and afterwards we asked them a few questions to find out their thought process behind the card they made.

Insights
Everyone customized their card, customization is a symbol of the time and effort they put into their gift.

Interviews, Survey, Affinity Diagram

Why?
These three research methods allowed us to collect a large amount of data for synthesizing which we will us to we inform our prototypes and design decisions.

Our in-depth UX research and methods occured over the course of 3 months, in which we explored a variety of domains and sources and found 5 key insights which will inform our future design decisions

The Gift Box prototype was created from Insight 1, and received positive feedback. If you were to give me a gift, you would use this new service which sends your gift to a special lock box located near me. I would then use a geocaching app to locate the box!

InstaStickies tries turn the digital into physical: a curated set of your instagram photos will be turned into physical post-it notes! You can then decorate your room etc. with your instagram pictures.

Blind Gift is a prototype that picks a gift at random for two people, this way the thoughts of obligation stress is eliminated.

Us Time is a concept in which people can earn credits to Unwrapped by simply putting their phones face-down when they are hanging out with friends. This was a prototype centered around relationship maintenance and building.

Sharing lies in between gifting and commnication, it contains qualities of both and can be re-framed as a gifting behavior.

To explore how normal friendships can be maintained, we explored a prototype that collects events in the lives of your group of friends and compiles it to a magazine delivered to everyone.

View Ideation Decisions

The Creative Matrix: beginnings of our prototype ideas

This activity allowed us pool together the knowledge we've gained from our research into a variety of possible domains of tech and users.

Why?
We were able to use this method to rapidly brainstorm a plethora of possible ideas for our problem space, these ideas can then be tested and/or combined.

We also conducted a survey in order to see if young people wanted technology to help with relationship maintenance. This better guided us in framing the type of prototypes we were building.

Speed dating: taking our ideas into the field

We tested our ideas with 30 people.

Why?
Fail Fast! Running through our initial ideas lets us filter out the ones that simply won't work, or we can go back and tweak the prototype some more based on feedback!

Here's a summary of what I did & learned in this project:

What I Did

Created and iterated Hi-Fidelity wireframes, interactions, animations, and prototypes.

Participated in user interviews, user testing, and various user research methods.

Led client meetings and co-design activities with client company.

What I Learned

New interactions and ways to improve the app can be discovered when creating & user testing a robust prototype!

User research can get very in-depth! It takes practice to know when we have enough data and move on to prototypes.

Working directly with the client taught me many things about communicating design and complex concepts.

Unwrapped - CMU MHCI Capstone Project