UCLIPPER: CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY

BRIEF

Use contextual inquiry to explore the academic research process.

This project was completed for a search & analytics client in a 5-person team over 6 weeks. Our client was seeking new features that would be useful to academic researchers, part of their large customer base.

SOLUTION

Our proposed product, uClipper, is an in-browser tool for saving content from across different sources for concept building and analysis within the client's main product offering. By operating within the platforms researchers already use, collecting and analyzing resources becomes a seamless process. 

SKILLS

Contextual interviews, interview interpretation, affinity models, flow and cultural models, visioning, storyboards, speed-dating.

PROCESS

Contextual Interviews & Interpretations

Our team conducted hour-long interviews with PhD students, post-docs, and professors, and a librarian at Carnegie Mellon to understand the academic research process. Through interpretation sessions and the creation of sequence flow models, we found a number of pain points in the literature review phase.

To further understand forces at play that might affect the adoption of any new product or features, we also created a cultural model of influences upon academic researchers.

Affinity Model & Walking the Wall

After going through our notes in interpretation sessions our team created an affinity model to cluster the main takeaways from interviews, including:

• Doing innovative research requires building upon existing work
• Literature reviews are time consuming
• People use makeshift solutions to discover and organize content
• Researchers have trouble collaborating with their teams on works cited pages and literature reviews

After we put the affinity model up, my teammates and I silently "walked the wall", labeling breakdowns, questions, and design ideas on additional Post-Its.

VISIONING

After walking the wall, we continued brainstorming design ideas through visioning - we set few limits for ourselves during this process, using a collaborative improv-style "yes, and" method to build upon each others' ideas.  Our ideas included solutions for collaboration and communication, data cleaning, sharing data, and displaying search results using augmented reality. 

Storyboarding and Speed-Dating

After judging the positives and negatives of ideas that came out of our visioning, we refined our ideas into presentable storyboards. To seek user validation of our ideas, we invited academic researchers to participate in short speed-dating sessions to gauge reactions to our different ideas. 

We received very positive reactions to the in-browser widget for collection literature from multiple sources, and since it seemed like technically feasible low-hanging fruit, we moved forward with this solution in our final poster pitch.

FINAL POSTER PITCH FOR UCLIPPER

Credit to teammate Clare Carroll for the final poster design!