About the Project
“Techassisst is an Augmented reality-based technical assistant which helps the user to be technical independent while facing technical issues at home.
The application lets you make better decisions and guides you while facing technically complex issues at home. It lets you connect to the people facing similar problems as you.
Timeline: 6 weeks
Project type: Classroom project
Tool: User Research, Personas, Ideation/Sketching, Storyboarding, Paper Prototyping, Wireframing, Hi-Fi Mockups
My Role: UX Designer
Design Intent
To Finalise a sector to work on, In order to come up with initial design brief in order to further research on it and come up with a redefined brief, I kept UN sustainable development goals as my base to pick up my sector by relating it to the challenges seen around.
On 1 January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — adopted by world leaders in September 2015 at a historic UN Summit — officially came into force.
Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Identifying the User Group
WOMEN IN STEM FIELD
About 74 per cent of young girls express interest in STEM fields and computer science. And yet, by the time they make decisions about what to study and where to start their careers, something happens. Only 18 per cent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 per cent of computing jobs are held by women. It’s worse at the top of the corporate world — just 5 per cent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women.
WOMEN IN INDIA
At present, 72% of women in India do not have access to mobile phones, according to GSMA’s Connected Women report for 2015. Over 1.7 billion women do not own mobile phones in low and middle-income countries, it says, adding that women are on average 14% less likely to own a mobile phone than men, which translates to 200 million fewer women than men owning mobile phones.
When I related these issues or facts with the challenges faced by women around me like my mother at home or generally women at home, women were dependent on some external assistance like men of the house or her children to overcome daily technological challenges.
WOMEN AND GIRLS
The User group, I chose to work with included, women at home and the girls at school. Women at home have to deal with daily technological issues and had a sense of loss of independence when they fail to solve those issues. The main challenge lies in the disinterest, women show in learning about technology or anything new.
I chose girls in school as another user group to study so as to know what actually leads to this lack of interest and the less number of females entering STEM fields.
Initial Design Brief
To help women at home to be technology friendly so that they are self - reliant. To include women at home in the technological fields so that they don't feel that dependency.
Also, to motivate girls at school to have an inclination towards technological fields or to take up STEM fields for higher education for the Inclusion of women in technology.
The world is becoming a much better place with the advance in technology and the role of women can never be overemphasized in the world growth today, women played important roles in the Information technology sector, but the ratio of men compared to that of women in this sector is probably 80-20%.
Secondary Research
Social and Cultural Trends
- The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently pledged to advance gender equality. However, this major global challenge has been on the agenda for decades, whilst women continue to face enormous social, economic and cultural barriers to achieving real equality. The challenge is that some of the fundamental barriers to women’s empowerment remain hidden, such as the lack of access to products and education to properly manage menstruation.
- The numbers show we’re losing women at an alarming rate. In fact, 50 per cent of women with careers in STEM fields will eventually leave because of hostile work environments, according to the Harvard Business Review. Most women don’t experience obvious forms of discrimination or sexism. Instead, they face an undercurrent of condescension that leads to a feeling of isolation.
- While 43% of Indian men own a cell phone, women lag behind with only 28% mobile ownership. The gender gap in mobile ownership – estimated at about 114 million – reinforces the fact of unequal access, but also paints an incomplete and misleading picture. Only 29% of India’s internet users are women. Unless this digital gender divide is bridged, India’s aggressive push towards digitisation will further entrench the political, economic and social marginalisation of women.
Technological Trends
- Internet of things
- Maker culture - sustainability
- Augmented and virtual reality
- Digital India
- 2018 is the year of the bots
- Data overload
Initiatives to include women in Tech
GSMA - connected women programme
Their mission is to reduce the gender gap in mobile internet and mobile money services in low- and middle-income countries and unlock significant commercial and socio-economic opportunities.
GSMA’s Connected Women works with mobile operators and their partners to address the barriers to women accessing and using mobile internet and mobile money services.
LaXmi
A board game to facilitate financial literacy learning – with which he hopes to help 212 million illiterate Indian women make better lives for themselves.
Danfoss NOI
Danfoss and design-people joined forces for a research collaboration about innovation culture and practices. Together we embarked on a 3-year long design research project called Female Interaction (FI). We aimed to explore and address the female target group more effectively by exploring and tapping into female values, preferences, and lifestyle choices when it comes to tech products.
Home Voice Assistant
A virtual assistant is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual. Sometimes the term “chatbot” is used to refer to virtual assistants generally or specifically those accessed by online chat.
OXO Good Grip
The OXO “Good Grips” range of kitchen utensils began with a goal: to produce a vegetable peeler that was easy to hold and use, regardless of strength or manual dexterity. This resulted in OXO applying a Universal Design approach when designing any of their kitchen products.
VIFA Speakers
Early on, Vifa understood the potential impact of listening to female users’ demands and wishes in an audio-industry with a strong male bias. More specifically, Vifa required a design partner that would be able to translate female users preferences into specific design solutions and thus wrapping the company’s authentic sound performance in an exclusive design
Girls Who Code
'Girls Who Code' was founded with a single mission: to close the gender gap in technology. 'Girls Who Code' was founded five years ago with the belief that computing skills are a critical path to security and prosperity in today’s job market. What began with 20 girls in the heart of New York City, 'Girls Who Code' will reach 40,000 girls in all 50 U.S. states by the end of this year.
VR for Inclusive Experiences
Social Training is where I believe Virtual Reality is going to have the biggest impact.
Social Training in Virtual Reality has enabled us to:
- Step into the shoes of others
- Experience previously impossible viewpoints
- Communicate information in new ways
- Deliver highly engaging training
- Provide more evenly distributed access to the best quality training
- Enable new science
Primary Research
Abhayasa Vidayalaya
Abhayasa Vidyalayam is situated on Gangireddual Dibba, Gunadala hill, Vijayawada (A.P) India. Deepa Memorial Charitable Trust, recognized by the Government of Andra Pradesh (until X standard) was established in 1995. SCERT syllabus is taught in classes VI standard onwards.
The curriculum and the methodology are directed by the principle that the child should experience the joy of learning. The loving and lively relation between the adults and the children ensures a fear-free environment which is essential for joyful learning. And the program is absolutely stress-free since the start.
User Personas
Ideation
When analyzing products and user experience from the gender perspective, it is essential to distinguish between the following :
• the value dimension
• the functions/benefit dimension
• the interaction dimension
• the aesthetic dimension
• the communication dimension
Each of these dimensions can be gender biased and needs to be specifically focused on to create the whole user experience
Femme Den’s Five Tenets of Designing for Women
1. EMPHASIZE BENEFITS OVER FEATURES: Rather than touting feature sets and specs (how fast or big or slick something is), make the product’s benefits clear. Who can it connect her to? How does it make her life easier? How will it save her time?
2. LEARN HER BODY: Women have different bone and muscle structure: Simply shrinking products lead to injury and frustration.
3. CRAFT A COHESIVE STORY: Women consider more than just the product itself. Design the whole experience with them in mind, from advertising and packaging to the retail environment and customer service.
4. IDENTIFY A SPOT ON THE SPECTRUM: For some tasks, women want to feel girly; for others, not at all. Nix the hyper-feminized stereotype and consider where on the spectrum this product should land.
5. REMEMBER HER LIFE STAGES: Are you designing for a 25-year-old or a 65-year-old?
What women want
A product should Motivate them
Essential benefits
Easy to use
Make something which connects them - social benefits.
Suits the gender role and culture.
They like narratives and construction of story/characters.
Like seeing change.
Less of hassle
Final Solution
The Final solution had to be something that should motivate the user to use the technology by providing essential benefits and gives him/ her to socially interact with other users.
The final intervention was to build a platform for the user to get technical assistance through an augmented reality-based technical assistant and also provide them with a platform to share their story with other users facing similar problems.
Final Solution
Following are the Video mockups showing the AR-based features of TECHASSIST. Here we are guiding the user to remove the hard disk from the CPU as a technical task.
BUY FEATURE
REPAIR FEATURE