Research Tool Design
Tags: Information Architecture, System Design, User Experience design, Data Visualisation, UI Design
This project was done while interning with bRnD Studio under the mentorship of Sudhir Bhatia.
My Contribution
Design Research, System Architecture, Data visualisation, UI/ UX Design, Design Prototype
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About the tool
The timeline tool designed is a tool that helps one collect information online, sort it and view it in different layouts based on categories, Timeline (in case there is a history to be noted) and by date. It lets you compare articles and create new stories based on observations and conclusions. The tool encourages the user to make richer analysis by providing views that help in pattern recognition based on detailed tagging.
Why do we need this tool?
The method of researching, learning and collecting information has been heavily dependent on the internet. The amount of people making it a habit to read for recreation or for work purpose has been increasing. Thus bookmarking, saving and archiving collected knowledge or archiving articles for later use plays an important role for readers. Existing tools like Pinterest, Pocket , Flipboard which allows users to bookmark or collect articles in different ways. But the problem arises when research done leads to going through a lot of articles. Tools mentioned above are mostly avoided since it is difficult to go back and forth articles to come up with conclusions. Handling the articles on such platforms and making one’s own notes on another platform makes is difficult to concentrate. Solutions like taking printouts instead would lead to paper wastage.
Thus this tool not only helps researchers and professionals to future caste but also students to collaborate with each other while working on group projects. This tool could also encourage the ones who find value in generating articles or writing blogs.
Use Case
The use case taken was from the existing physical Mobile Computing Timeline created by bRnd Studio to experience the process of data collection and creating stories. This timeline showcased occurrence of various events circulating around Mobile Computing ever since the creation of the world wide web.
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Design Process
1. Reading, Researching and Contributing to the Timeline :
The first task was to research and finding data relevant enough to contribute towards the existing timeline content. This not only helped me find incidental data but also point out behaviour changes of consumers at some point.
2. Data visualisation to representing different ways of displaying information collected on the web-tool
3. Creating the Conceptual Model:
There were some important features that this tool needed to have:
- Filtering and viewing information in different ways
- Ability to compare multiple articles and create new stories
- Ability to collaborate projects with multiple people
4. Wire-framing:
Wireframes were built on Balsamic software. A more refined version was created after the first review.
5. Designing the interface:
The interactions and experiences were designed such that the users can have the ability of the following:
- A user should be able to view the articles bookmarked in three major displays by Category, Timeline view (in the case of historic data collection) and Latest view (based on the date when it was saved).
- They should have the ability to compare different tags and categories that can help in pattern formation.
- While creating stories (generating new articles), the user should be able to view different articles and add in the stories without leaving the screen.
- A user should be able to make notes so that it can be used later for creating stories.
- An article on the web should be easily saved in the database of the project currently worked upon.
