Case study: Redesigning your dining experience
Introduction
The design has always been the key to innovation. Even long before UX became a discipline, it helped companies to be successful. The field of UX design may be new, the process of Design Thinking has been helping companies to understand their users better. In the past decade, speakers and bloggers have started highlighting the importance of Design Thinking in modern society.
Businesses are becoming successful by integrating design thinking in their process. Design Thinking makes you innovative.
Even non-designers use design thinking in their day to day life to solve problems. And that’s what I have tried doing in this project.
In this project, I was given a fixed user base and asked to solve the problems they face in their dining area. You must be thinking, what does a dining area had to do with UX/UI? Trust me, that was the first thought that crossed my mind. But with the advancement of this project, I learnt that User Experience Design and Design Thinking is far more than just designing the apps. It is about empathising with the user’s problem, finding a solution and making the experience better.
Why Design Thinking?
The Design Thinking process comprises 5 important steps. Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.
To provide a solution to the user’s problem, one first need to put herself in their shoes. To Empathise with their problems and why they are problems to them. Which aspect is the more pressing, is it money, or is it space in this case, or is it comfort? Or maybe something one can not predict. This step is crucial because everyone comes from a different background. The designer’s real-life might not be similar to the users.
This step prevents the designer from treating themselves as a user. It allows them to forget their problems and feel compassionate to the user’s problem. This step involves detailed conversations with the users and trying to reach the root cause of their situation.
After talking and understanding their pain points, the next step is to Define the Problem Statement. The interview insights and problems are then further analysed by the designer. A designer churns all the interview insights and centre issues to obtain a precise problem statement.
The next step is Ideation. After thoroughly analysing the research, a designer comes up with a set of solutions that may fit in solving the problem. But one should test it to make sure it works.
But creating a product with said solution takes a lot of resources, workforce and time. So to test the solution, a Prototype is made displaying all the necessary features of the proposed solution.
And who others can be better than the users themselves to test the solution. So in the Testing, the prototype is taken back to the users to get it reviewed. If it fails in solving their problem, the product is improved, the process gets repeated until users feel that their problem is solved.
Understanding the users
For this project, my mentors instructed me to focus on 4–5 users. They told me to consider them as the only people in the World. In this project, due to a shortage of time, I decided to go directly with the interviews as I had a two-week deadline.
First, I created a set of questions that covered their introduction, their habits, their likes and dislikes, their favourite places, comfort or discomfort, their ideal place to eat, their best and worst experience, were they satisfied or not. If not, then why? I framed all these questions to touch every possible aspect of a dining experience.
While empathising with the users, I aimed to focus on the hidden needs and demotivation of the users. The necessity of the users can take any form, be it psychological, physical or related just to the consumer’s personality.
So to understand users better, I sat down with them for a one to one conversation where I let them lead me to their problem. I gave them hypothetical situations concerning their dining experience to analyse their preferences. After a half an hour conversation, I could somewhat relate to their pain points. Empathising with the user makes you forget your past experiences while envisioning and learning the user’s viewpoint.
Defining the Problem Statement
After collecting data through the interviews, I drew all the perceptions and insights to discover the centre of the issues. After completing my research, I would sum up my findings as mentioned below.
A high percentage of users abandoned their dining area to settle in the drawing-room or bedrooms while eating. And dining area merely becomes a place for party dinners and storage rooms.
In this project, I decided to go a bit traditional and not follow any modern analysis method since the size of the data was small.
After understanding the problems from a user’s perspective, I found,
- They had very little space to keep the tableware. Even during dining, it gets clumsy with all the plates and dishes.
- 75% of the users described discomfort with the tables and chairs of their dining set so much that they ended up spending most of the time on comfortable sofas while eating.
- Watching television is another reason.
- Most of the user complained about the arrangement of unwanted appliances around their dining area. If given an opportunity, most of them would prefer rearrangement.
Ideation — Top Insights
In the ideation stage, the ideas are allowed to flow freely. It is just the compilation of all the thoughts which comes to a designer’s mind when he/she looks at the problem of the users. Ideation is not just following up the ideas which come to the mind of the designer. As often happens, a designer might not have complete knowledge of the field in which the problem lies. Then the competitive analysis & industry research becomes the next step.
Since I was not from the interior designing industry, I wore my learning hat and went straight to the internet to study the types of dining room designs and their strengths and weaknesses.
- The first idea that occurred to me was for a larger table with more space to accommodate all the dishes and some extra complementaries. A simple solution to clumsy space would have been a larger table. But not all families could afford it. Neither financially nor they have room for it.
- After researching, a multipurpose cabinet seemed the ideal fit for the scenario. Initially, I decided to keep its design flexible. I added drawers of different sizes serving as a crockery cabinet or kitchen appliance storage unit or cutlery or as a wine cabinet.
- Another serious problem faced by the user group was uncomfortable chairs. Users knew that they should eat in the dining area, but all of them loved the comfort. Hence, they didn’t think much about abandoning the dining table and moving to their drawing rooms or TV rooms.
- I decided to remove two of the chairs from one side of the dining table. I took that decision to solve the problem of uneasiness and provide more comfort. Then I decided to replace them with a bench with soft cushions and broader seats than chairs.
From the interviews, I observed that the people are only obliged to eat in a poised manner during their fancy dinner parties. Dinner parties hardly happen. But a user alone takes 4–5 meals daily in which users wish to sit in whichever way they want and enjoy any entertainment activity they desire. That encouraged me to remove only two chairs which created enough room for lone leisure lunches. This observation also gave me the idea of positioning an entertainment source in the room.
Apart from these three ideas, I came up with some suggestions to improve the room’s ambience.
- One of them was the addition of a small coffee table.
- Addition of better lighting and music.
But later, I deduced that these solutions are not for real problems but leisure.
Prototyping the solution
Design thinking is a process in which you would not know about the feasibility of your idea until you test it with real users. And that is the purpose of prototyping. A prototype can be a sketch, model, or cardboard box.
We implement the solutions within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated and either accepted, improved and re-examined or rejected based on the user experiences. (Read more)
Among the above suggested three solutions, the limitation was to implement only one idea. At this point, I had to make a tough choice. Some part of me did not want to compromise with the experience. So, I came up with a blended solution of all three ideas.
To solve the space problem during dining, I came up with the solution to provide a shelf under the table. So that user can keep the dishes and additional cutlery there while dining. Next, to provide extra storage space, I designed drawers under the table. So that user can store frequently used washed cutlery and crockery there.
But the idea of having a drawer under the table was conflicting with a shelf under the table. To solve this issue, I shifted the position of the drawers to the bottom. I believed that they would provide extra storage as well as a footrest.
The discomfort was another pressing issue that led to abandoning the dining area. To solve this issue, I decided to add a cushioned settee with a broader seat.
But to improve the use of space and tackle two problems from one solution, I added drawers and a cabinet under the bench. Then, I provided drawers as storage space for small stuff while the large shelf has enough space to accommodate kitchen appliances.
The reason why I added more space was to make the room more organised.
Lastly, I rearranged the dining room by adding a television and positioning the bench on the opposite wall of the television wall. So that user can have their meals in comfort while having good entertainment in their day-to-day life. The aim was to design a hybrid experience for the user. That would allow the user to have a drawing room experience while also using their dining area.
User Reviews- Top Insights
In the test stage, designers present the proposed solutions to the users for their review. I attempted to understand their pain points a little better.
- Almost all the users favoured the concept of the cushioned bench.
- 80% of the users admired the space added in the dining area but showed a need for more space.
- Almost all the users gave a go for the rearrangement in the dining area with the television.
- But on the other hand, almost all the users unapproved in removing the backrest for the bench. 40% of the users were persistent in the addition of extra lights in the room for ambience.
- They were also reluctant about the drawers being at the bottom and serving as a footrest as they did not want to keep foot over their crockery.
The New & Improved Design
In the new design, I added a cushioned backrest with the bench to provide support. After removing the footrest, I moved the drawers up. In this way, they can serve as an undershelf and save more space than earlier by allowing the increase in the size of the drawers.
Future scope
Being the first project, its process lacked various techniques which could have helped me gain better and deeper insights into the user’s scenarios. Apart from that, due to a shortage of time and resources, this project focussed on a small dataset that can be increased in future.
Conclusion
Being the first project in the field of designing experiences, it broke many of my misbelieves. The first lesson taught me that User Experience design is a lot more than designing just web applications and products. It is related to all the solutions which exist in the market and making them better. Not the aesthetics, the accessibility is crucial.
Last but not the least, I would like to give a huge shoutout 📢 to my mentor Arpita Dhir for guiding me with the design principles and help me fly a little higher.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed reading the case study as much as I enjoyed working on it. I would love to learn more about you. If you’re someone who gets joy in talking about solutions that make a difference. Or if you want to read my oversimplified definitions of design theory. Feel free to drop a hi! 👋 on my Twitter or LinkedIn.
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