What If...?

This is a self evaluation for the 'What If...?' group project.

The problem we identified was that people in Leeds are afraid of being out at night in the dark. The evidence we found to support this was based on the results of questionnaires and also looking at statistics related to crimes and looking at publications offering advice for people avoiding crime in Leeds.

To categorise the research the group did, the surveys we carried out were Primary research and the statistics we found were secondary. We also created primary research in the form of photographing potential crime sites and also we counted locations that we could used for our final resolution (potential sticker places). We used secondary research to focus our message to target students, we found they are much more likely to be the victims of assaults and robbery at night, and we also found research that helped us to target the area for our campaign: the A660 corridor has been highlighted as the main area these sorts of crimes happen against students.

The purely statistical numbers based research (for example we asked students to vote on our developmental work to gauge which final resolution would get our message across best) could be considered Quantitative research. The opinion driven research we did (for example we asked people what exactly they felt threatened by at night) would be categorized as Qualitative.

All these methods we used were useful for this project, even though some of our results could have been predicted I felt much more confident about our resolution knowing for sure we were on the right track, and I had the figures in front of me to prove it. The qualitative research is always interesting because asking open questions to people often results in surprising answers that can take the project in a different direction to one that quantitative figures alone would have resulted in. The research really did dictate the both the concept and also the design work of this project. It became clear from asking opinions on our developmental work, the clear common sense message with simple graphics would engage with our target audience better than the other test resolutions. I was very happy to go along with these results.

I don't think we found any of these methods particularly problematic, but it was hard to know what point to stop doing more research and focus on the resolution, in the end I feel we got the balance about right with a great body of research and an effective sticker as our resolution. I think if I wasn't in a group with others, I would have been worried about the amount of time spent on researching and would have started designing sooner. I now feel doing this wouldn't have resulted in a better resolution so I have learnt about the use of research and time management as a result of this brief.

It is hard to categorise five things that we could have done different, but for me the main issue was that I missed the briefing and start of this project due to illness. This is never ideal but in this project in particular I found it hard to get up to speed and contribute to the group effort, as so much work had been already done before I rejoined the team. In the end I think we pulled together well and it was great to see a wide variety of work from each member of the team coming together and helping our final resolution.

Five things I have learnt about the design process in the last two weeks.
1) research is vital
2) it doesn't matter if you don't know the resolution to a brief half way through the time you have to complete
3) I should spend more of my time on research in the future
4) research can often make decisions easier as you have the proof that one way of doing something will work/is more popular/will be better targeted at the audience.
5) when you get stuck, doing qualitative primary research could be a good way to get fresh ideas and get going again.

Some images from the group work (click to enlarge)

The final sticker, simple and effective, targeted at students walking along the A660 corridor.
This was a board we put together to show just some of our research and alternative design resolutions
The final resolution in action (thanks to David for thegreat photo) next to some of the more important bits of research we used to create it, with the referances to where they all came from.

Fresh off the printer, would make for cool wallpaper I think...