To fully discover your user, you need to do research. There are many methodologies that facilitate researching – literature study, market segmentation, field research, just to name a few! The latter gives a direct insight into what your user does, how, why, where and when. Field research can give you the most information but also requires a lot of preparation to get the most out of the time spent in the field. It’s important to know what you want to research, which tools are needed and how the research is conducted before you begin to ensure no time is wasted.
Observing the installers whilst working was very valuable for the GlassKit Team. We have been assigned a project to develop a solution using Google Glass to increase efficiency and safety for Smit Elektra’s maintenance and installation staff. After over a week of constant research into the Google Glass platform and our target user, we spent a morning translating the ideas and insights we have gained into paper prototypes which allow us to visualise the flow of the UI (user interface) and how the user interacts with it at a basic level. By tinkering with our paper prototypes we gave ourselves time to notice faults in our solutions to ensure that if the prototypes do have faults we can fail early giving us plenty of opportunity to improve on our solution at an early stage in the development process.