Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved. Ann Douglas
Friday February 11th two students from the Interaction Design programme had their offseason degree project examination, Maggie Kuo and Jordi Parra.
Maggie Kuo's degree project Home Swede Home is a service design for buying a new home. She collaborated with Booli, an housing search engine. Kuo&s interest in the area comes from working at her father&s realtor business before studying design.
In her research, Maggie interviewed people in search of a new home, people who recently bought a house, and also realtors. She discovered that there was little or no trust for real estate agents. Clients wonder if the realtors care about the client's wishes and needs, or if they just care for the money.
During her research Kuo found five user types, and she had seven insights. She defines the five different types of users as hunters, self-assured, transitional buyers, dreamers and investors. Her insights were that
- online browsing experience is messy
- the existing services are not satisfactory
- people are suspicious of the information provided by the realtors
- home is not a spec sheet - buying a home is buying a new life
- there is a risk of what Maggie calls a "Hemnet-addiction": There are more than a million searches per week, but only 150 000 homes change owner every year
- filters filter out the surprises and this is not always a good thing, you might miss out on things
- more transparency is needed
Kuo focused on a sleek browsing experience and trustworthiness and she showed a very impressive video that really said all you need to know about the concept. Maggie passed her exam and the two examiners, Programme Director Niklas Andersson, and Professor Mike Stott, thought she had a great presentation and that her concept had a high level of professionalism.
Jordi Parra&s degree work was carried out in cooperation with Spotify and his aim was to explore how to use Spotify at home without a computer. He also wanted to focus on concepts that were feasible and could be implemented in short term.
During his research phase he concluded that our music consuming has changed a great deal over the years. Earlier you were limited to tapes, records and radio, now there are no limits. Parra determines that access is superior to ownership. Earlier people used to make mixed tapes and give to boyfriends, girlfriends or friends, and Jordi wanted to use this in his concept, which resulted in a gift box with a player, a Spotify subscription and playlists. Also Parra passed his exam.
On his blog, Jordi writes: "The concept is a standalone player with 8 tags that can be linked to music. It can be for yourself, or to give it to somebody else as a present, giving you the chance to link music to the tags before giving it to that person... In a way, like we used to do with mixtapes, but now the "mixtapes" are RFID tags linked to music on Spotify. It is a working prototype that I built to show and test the concept, it's not a final product."
Creative Applications as well as TechCrunch have written about Parra&s design.
