Process: Many People, Many Wallets

The first design process I went through in university was to create a wallet through a design sprint. It was very interesting, and I learned a lot about my partner through this process.

We used the document created by Hasso Plattner, from the Institute of Design at Stanford (Creative commons, Non-Commercial, Share alike licence). It started off with designing our ideal wallet by ourselves, with no outside help, for 3 minutes.

Image of Ideal wallet page

This turned out okay, although very similar to my current wallet, but felt very rushed. I wasn’t taking the time to think about it. The good news was that this was just a start to give us a place to compare the following design process “A human-centred design thinking approach.”

So we started, asking questions and interviewing the person we where paired up with. Although we went back and forth asking questions of each other when we thought of them instead of just having one person ask the questions for 8 minutes, then the other. This may have lended itself better to this situation, although it likely wouldn’t once we get into interviewing people not working on the same project as us.

What I had found was that we where two people with very different outlooks, Jerry (My partner), was sentimental and held onto things that he had gathered while he was traveling. I, on the other hand, thought of my wallet as a tool. He liked the tactile feeling of pulling open a wallet and using cash, while I preferred my wallet to open as quickly as possible and not waste any time.

Notes on interview

We then moved on to using the notes that we had gathered during that step to figure out our partner’s goals and wishes for their wallet, and note down some insights about our partner. Then with those we created a POV sentence to describe why we where creating the wallet for them, and what they needed it to do.

Reframing the problem

Then we brainstormed “5 radical ways to meet your user’s needs”, and gathered some feedback on those methods, which really helped solidify what was needed in my head so my revised design would be better.

Ideation

Then onto iteration of the design, I created a more fleshed out form of what I thought he needed. Then on to prototyping with paper and tape:

Once we got the prototype done we needed to get some feedback on it.

Feedback

What I learned is we had both put a lot of our own ideas into the designs. I tried to make his easier and quicker to use, while he made mine able to carry extra things for sentimental reasons. As much as we had tried to get into the head of our partner and design something for them, there was a little of us that had gotten in there.

As I said at the start, it was a very interesting experience, I learned a lot, and I am eager to try it again.

References:

  1. Both, T. (2016, April 28). The Wallet Project. The Wallet Project. https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/groups/designresources/wiki/4dbb2/The_Wallet_Project.html
  2. Fitz-Walter Z. (2020, March 11). DES 100 workshop 2.