User Research

Once we came across the idea of tackling this issue, we knew we would need to get in touch with people actually interested in a potential solution. The idea was not to design for ourselves; it was to design for learners and teachers in the real world. That is why we sought out a guitarist, a tutor, and a sewer for interviews.

Design Sketching

The interviews proved quite helpful in exposing issues we had not considered beforehand. Trust was a top priority for each individual. If we intended to connect neighbors who had never met, everyone needs to feed safe to learn and enjoy themselves. Skill level also turned out to be important to manage. Students want to know that their instructors are up for the challenge of leading. Lastly it was clear that we needed to be ready for a variety of compensation forms. Some people need monetary compensation while others are in it for the fun, so we needed to allow variation. With our newfound insights in mind, we constructed specific tasks to focus on and moved toward prototyping potential solutions.

Building Our Initial Paper Prototype

Many different solutions came up in our brainstorming process. A mobile application seemed to be most appropriate for our needs, but we realized there were a lot of directions we could go with an app. We were ultimately led to a hybrid of several of our ideas in a proximity based social networking app with avatars in community rooms. We believed it would be a fun solution to the problem, but we couldn’t really know until we testing the theory.

Usability Testing

Our user testing pushed us to rapidly iterate on our design. With each session we found new problems and considered potential solutions. The process proved fruitful and led to a significantly more useful design in the end. We’re confident the application will start many friendships and create many masters.