Ideation
Since we had primary experiences in and of different years in Boiler Gold Rush (BGR), we did not conduct very much research. We did interview two team leaders and five participants. Many of our insights pertain to the narrative of users being uninterested in most of BGR's activities. Most of our research pertains to usability testing with our ideation.
Purdue Everywhere​
Purdue UX Studio Project
This project asked us to enhance the freshman orientation program at Purdue University. It is called Boiler Gold Rush and it is a week of games, information meetings, social sessions, etc. Our goal was to engage students. Year after year, there are trends of disinterest in the activities that BGR offers. We want to engage freshmen in a more effective way.
Contribution Statement
This project was limited to paper prototyping. This team of five contributed equal share to research, ideation, and presentation. Other members follow:
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Sarah Palagy
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Meryl Lennon
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Luke Matheny
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Walter Dorau
We ideated around many different ideas for this project. Considering that many of the ideas that we brainstormed were already existing within the BGR program, it took many rounds of sketching to come to a final design. Some initial ideas included scavenger hunts, bingo, and collective sports. We also explored RFID technology.
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After ideating, we came to the conclusion that we did not want to add to the packed schedule that BGR already has. (BGR lasts a week from 7am-10pm every day). Since it already has many activities with very little breaks, we wanted to integrate something into the existing experience. This sketch of mine shows early an iterations of our final solution.
Solution
As seen in the sketches above, we decided on the boiler band. We have decided to use this simple band to engage students with each other. Our band is an LED bracelet with the ability to change colors to the users' choice. We chose this as it was lower on the cost end, does not take away from the BGR experience, and is very simple to implement.
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So how does it work? Through the PurdueGuide app, which is the primary app that the BGR experience takes place on, there will be a series of daily questions with specific answers. There are three questions a day and each answer pertains to a color on the band. These daily topics are shown in the calendar grid to the right. Through usability testing of our sketches, we found that this would influence students to start conversations with other students based on the answers that they choose, engaging students to befriend each other. Some questions are silly and other questions are more serious.
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