After completing the concept ideation portion of our project, our team is excited to be nearing the step of prototyping our ideas. We like having in class time to work on projects because we often find it hard to meet outside of class, due to conflicting schedules. Since we had in class time, it was nice to be able to work as a group and refine our ideas. This assignment was crucial to the development of practical ideas that would provide a good solution for our target audience.
When we worked on the last assignment, idea generation, it was fairly easy to come up with a lot of ideas, since we were going for quantity over quality. This project was a little more challenging because we had to refine our ideas and make sure they were practical and that we could prototype them in some way. We were focusing more on quality than quantity. The idea cards really helped us narrow down what was important for our user as well as take some previous ideas and make them better. When we were constructing our ideas, we decided we wanted our product to help our target audience but for it to also be useful for all people who want to work out at the gym.
Through our communication as a group, we were able to come up with better ideas. For our last project we all came up with a certain amount of ideas individually and then got together and decided on our favorite 5. For this project we talked as a team and would draw out ideas together. We think this approach fostered better innovation and lead us to decide on 5 great ideas to eventually prototype. Our group wishes in the past we would have had more in class time to work as a group because these projects really need to be done as a cohesive group and it is often really difficult to find that time outside of class.
After this assignment we believe we have a clear direction of where we are trying to take this project. We are really trying to reimagine the gym experience. Instead of simply just modifying existing gym products, we are trying to create something completely new.