Brainstorming & Lo-Fi-Prototype using Parallel Design

During our last exercise we had a brain-storming session and we did our first lo-fi prototypes.

While brain-storming we turned a lot of small ideas into bigger ones! Everyone yelled out ideas and words that we thought would work with our concept idea. We did this for about ten minutes until the ideas started slowing down. The result: 

We later picked the ones that best fit our product design and placed them into categories:

After brain-storming we started summarizing and discussing and came up with some new features such as letting people review the spots they visited (which they found out about with the app) and that we might charge money for the previously mentioned "time-machine" idea as a "pro-version". Something we talked a bit more about was the idea of gamification. We talked about implementing some kind of game and high-score lists. Ideas for games were quizzes (about the locations informed about in the app), letting people tag themselves at the locations (using gps) and gaining points, battle-ship etc. Another idea was to get the application to point towards a location you're interested about, i.e if you're on the boat in camera-mode and you don't know where Grönalund is, an arrow will appear on the screen to direct where you are looking at.

With some time left we started developing a very lo-fi prototype using pen and paper. We used the parallel design technique, splitting up into two groups. Having the concept, personas, pain-points and categories in mind was a very good help constructing the prototype. 

When comparing the prototypes one group preferred having the camera-guide-mode as start screen, while the other group figured a menu start screen would be better. This brought the discussion to the context of use, will the users only use the application on the boat? If not, a menu start screen would probably be for the best, but if the app is limited to the boat the camera-guide-mode would probably be preferred

Both prototypes had good ideas, which we will implement in the following prototypes. After doing this exercise we realized that the iterative process is truly a necessity.

The prototypes:

One design focusing on the camera function being the main feature, while the other design chose to have a menu of some sort and later choosing the camera function.