Grandparents raising grandchildren is a national phenomenon with statistics at over 2.4 million. In Illinois, the figure climbs above 104,000
and Chicago alone has more than 41,000 grandparent-headed households.
Grand Families is a Chicago-based 501 (3) (c) not-for profit organization
serving 150 families helping provide information services and support to grandparents and their grandchildren. Grandparents have to work within the
court systemregarding matters of custody. The process is confusing and difficult for stressed grandparents to navigate.
One aspect of this project will be understanding the structure of the custody court system, the process and the obstacles within it and how it can be made to work better for
both users and administrators. Another aspect of this project will entail the development of a toolkit for new participants in the program.
How to get into user's shoes and feel their pain or problems?
In ID, we believe that through observation, we can collect the information from user intearction with the environment and the products. However,
we might need to ask ourselves, are the data we gathered has been contaminated because people put on acting when camera's
around?
Then how to make the observed object feel more comfortable of being watched and documented? (Less reactive effects.) How to balance
between natural setting and artificial setting in order to get the helpful informations?
This is the observing users' project that concentrate on defining user experience in Devon, Chicago. We went to visit the neiborhood, document everything we saw, and finally, we developed the 5E user experience map, compared this experience to a theme park experience, which lead us to the final advice of how Devon should improve and turn into a place that user will have better user experience while they visit.
In order to fully understand how kids learn we set out to talk to a range of students. We were hoping to learn how kids currently keep records of their work and ways in which they reflect and provide assessment to their work. We presented each student to be interviewed with a camera and asked them to take pictures of things in their lives according to the POEMS framework (people, objects, environments and services). We then developed their pictures and returned to interview each student about the pictures they had taken.
We interviewed a number of students. We talked to home schoolers ranging in age from six to thirteen as well as their mothers. We felt it was important to talk to their mothers as well because we were looking for how records are kept and often in the case of home schooled students it is the parents that keep track of all their accomplishments the way the school system would for a public school student. We also interviewed middle school and high school ages students that attended public school, and a few students who are a part of an after school program in Hyde Park.
This is the research that went through different product analysis methods and conclude into several possible trend for the company's next step. Not only focus on the form study but also functions, by layering out the functions that already provided in the market, we can know how and what had been developed, and what is our weak and strength are..
