Hello everybody!
It’s been a month now since we first arrive here in Fukuoka and it’s safe to say that we have started to settle down a bit. Don’t get me wrong, we still get surprised every day by the many strange and delightful things this country has to offer (even getting coffee from a vending machines is fun and strange), but with the start of our project we have gotten more a daily routine and things are beginning to feel a bit more familiar.
The goal for our first sprint (the first three weeks of the project) was to create a simple first prototype for in the waiting room of Fukuoka Airport. To do this we decided to start with some research on the design of waiting rooms and waiting lines. After a few days of searching we found some useful information and insights about what makes a waiting experience more fun or meaningful and less boring or frustrating. For example, fun fact! an airport in Houston managed to solve all the complains from people waiting for their luggage by placing the luggage receival carousel all the way on the other side of the airport. It turns out that people rather spend more time walking from point A to B, than stand around doing nothing.
With all these insights we decided it was time for our first brainstorming session. Now, when you put a few people with different cultural backgrounds together (all speaking their second or third language) you’re bound to get a lot of miscommunication. To solve this we decided to do the brainstorming a little differently, by drawing and sketching all our ideas instead of verbally communicating them. This turned out to be a great way to explain our ideas to each other, and we ended up with three concepts for our first prototype. So our next step was choosing one, and making it!
However we didn’t realise that we had forgotten a very important part of design, we hadn’t done any research on the people we were designing for. It is very important that you know who you are designing for and what his or her wishes and complaints are. Especially when you’re designing for people in another country. So we decided to put our first prototype on hold, and to focus on some user research.
To get information about our user we decided to go to Fukuoka Airport to do some short interviews with the travelers whom were waiting there for their flight. We interviewed a lot of different people about their waiting experience at the airport, what they liked about it and what could be better. From the results of these interviews we created three different personas or archetypes. We discovered that especially families with children had some problems while they waited, because there is not a lot to do for them at the airport. Most distractions and entertainment (like the souvenir shops and restaurants) are aimed at adults, and so the children quickly get bored. This we found very interesting and we’re looking forward to exploring this further and seeing if we can design something specifically aimed at kids and families.
So that was our first sprint in a nutshell, sadly we didn’t make a first prototype, but we gathered a lot of interesting and useful information. Now we are ready to start creating a prototype in our next sprint and we can’t wait. In the meantime we will keep exploring the many sights in Japan, from beautiful temples to crazy karaoke rooms. See you next time!