Targeted Design
One of the main principles that we Experience Designers hold dear to their heart is Human-centered Design.
Human-centered design (HCD) (also Human-centred design, as used in ISO standards) is an approach to problem solving, commonly used in design and management frameworks that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process.
Simple as it may sound, it’s ideal to follow this approach to meet user expectations. It’s only been a couple of decades since HCD was brought into wide practice. But there where pioneers who excelled in this even before HCD’s introduction and made their mark. One such personal is Henry Dreyfuss.
Henry Dreyfuss was an industrial design pioneer. Dreyfuss is known for designing some of the most iconic devices found in American homes and offices throughout the twentieth century, including the Western Electric Model 500 telephone, the Westclox Big Ben alarm clock, and the Honeywell round thermostat. His personas Joe and Josephine were legendary.
HCD is quite simple in principles. And this I’m going to explain through one of my project.
Fishing community is an integral part of India as a country. India has a coastline of 7516.6 km — 5422.6 km of mainland coastline and 2094 km of island territories.
Fishing is done in different ways using traditional means as well as using technological backing. Our mission was to bridge the gap between large commercial fishing tycoons and small scale fishing entrepreneurs.
Commercial fishing make use of sophisticated equipments to increase the yield which small scale entrepreneurs lack. These equipments are pretty expensive for ordinary individuals to afford. Our task was to make these equipments affordable without making a large dent on their finance. One such equipment I worked on was a sonar system to scan sea for fish pools.
The system consist of a sonar device attached to the bottom of the boat and a tablet which controls the device and displays the scan.
The sonar devices are locally made which reduce its cost of production. We can use cheap tablets to pair with the device, thus reducing the cost and making it affordable for the common fishing community.
So far, the business plan seems solid and has potential. But, the challenge that I really enjoyed doing was designing an interface for this device. It’s through this device user controls the scan angle of sonar and sees the result. And its this part where HCD principle comes into effect.
Typical fishing sonars have physical buttons to control scan and has lot of technical information, which is not used in most cases. Adding buttons to the tablet adds on to the cost which defies the purpose behind the mission. So, we explored other elegant options to solve this issue.
First thought was to add buttons inside the interface, seemed like a no brainer. And that’s when the problems started to arise. We had different controls to change angle of scan, strength and rotation. All of these were equally important considering that these buttons were the primary actions whose result is displayed in the screen.
We knew we had to add the buttons inside the interface, but we were concerned whether our target audience would use this. Though it provided significant financial benefits to the users, because of its high cognitive load people might be reluctant to onboard. As we spoke more with stakeholders and the representatives of the community the path we should choose was getting more clearer. Now the aim was to embedded the buttons inside with out causing too much cognitive load for users to onboard.
The eureka moment! We started simulating ourselves inside a wobbly boat, looking into the screen. Interacting with the small buttons was not practical as precise tap interactions were not possible when the platform was shaking. So, tap interaction was out of the picture and we choose swipe instead. We had to calibrate the interaction response with respect to device and environment.
Haptic feedback was given for each unit change. Swipe up and down on left edge of screen, to control the angle of scan. Swipe up and down on right edge of screen controls strength of the signal. We took out all the text and replaced it with icon which dynamically update with relative illustration based on the values chosen.
This is not the perfect solution but, its a step in the right direction. And we were only able to take this step by putting ourselves in the user’s shoes. We kept our user as the focal point of this design process. The design was well accepted in the community. The product is still in development. Hopefully this would make life easier for the people who struggle to keep up with commercials players in the sea. May this lessen their load and help them build a better life.
