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for all your building materials, timber and sheet

Team

Linda Janssen
Sabrina Doornekamp
Jelmar van Voorst
Aishwarya Babu babu.aishwarya@gmail.com

Commissioner: STIHO

Description

Stiho is a supplier of construction, wood and plate materials. Costumers of Stiho are construction companies active in building, renovation and the development of small new building projects. Craftsmanship and knowledge about product and application modes are disappearing rapidly in the Dutch construction industry. Ageing is the main reason for this development. The loss of knowledge and skills is already causing problems in maintaining the quality of project in this industry. The question is how these skills and knowledge can be preserved and circulated to future generations through digital storytelling? The target group that Stiho wants to reach consists of construction companies active in building, renovation and the development of small new building projects. The media application that has to be developed must make this knowledge accessible to craftsmen at the ‘Stiho-building square’ (together with the Giebels formula) and at building locations.
By jelmarvanvoorst April 10th, 2013

Designing the concept

Fun fun fun! We arrived in the phase that we’re giving form and colour to our insights.  The most important insights that we received from the research:

– The users (craftsmen) are used to learn by doing
– Craftsmen are using smartphones and/or computer to search for more information
– There is a strong Mentor-Mentee and Peer-peer relationship
– The users don’t like to ask questions
– Craftsmen and STIHO employees share experiences and information by telling each other while visiting STIHO (feedback)
– There are no or less workshops given to STIHO employees since two years, the reason is lack of time and people
We are going to put our ideas in a new jacket and give it a skeleton and a look and feel. First we are creating a skeleton. This gives us a clear overview on what features should go where and what is the most usable form.  It all started with making a new planning for the upcoming two weeks and assigning tasks and new roles within the project.

 

Aishwarya is going to focus on the technical features within our concept. She is currently joining a native app workshop where she gets more information on how to program apps. This is important for us to get more in depth on how apps work, what program languages are being used and how what skills you need to master to develop an app.  Sabrina is going to focus on the information structure and architecture within our concept. How can we structure and store information that is being tranfsered? This is an important factor of the project because we are going to work with a lot of information and data. This data needs to be structured and easy to use. It is important that the end-user doesn’t drown in all the data that our concept offers. Linda en Jelmar are focussing on the interaction between the user and the system and on the look and feel of the concept. What features should go where and how should this look like?

An impression of Aishwarya’s enthousiasm:

Features

Before we could start working on the design of the concept we needed an overview of what information and features should be in the app. We created a flow chart which provided a detailed structure of the features. The next step was to create a functional concept and give a detailed description of each feature and how they relate with each other. We also looked at other case examples that use a similar system that our concept is using just to get more in depth of what is possible, what it looks like and how it works.

Paper Prototype

After we made the function concept we started creating a paper prototype. The paper prototype is a fast way to start experimenting with different forms and fuctions. It’s cheap, fast, functional and ofcourse fun to do.
Source: www.smashingmagazine.com

The goal is to use this prototype to start doing user tests. What we would like to find out from our first user test is if the paper prototype fits the user needs. Is it a proper concept? Later on we are going to see if the usability of the prototype fits the user needs. Is there a correct flow within the system?