Case Study: Enhancing your terrace experience
Being an aesthetic lover myself, I have always had a sharp eye for good looking stuff around me, naturally inclining towards designing beautiful looking stuff for people. I began to understand how imporant the experience of the user is as well.
I took terrace and make the user’s experience better by Design Thinking.
What is Design Thinking?
In layman terms, Design Thinking is the process of understanding your users, the problems they face and come up with solutions for the same. It’s not just a one step process but a 5-step iterative process towards creating the best solution for the user.
Let’s get to solving!
EMPATHIZE
The aim here was to connect with the users, understand them and learn their perspective to understand their problems better.
So I came up with the following questions to understand the user and their interactions with their terrace, to try and find the problems they would be facing:
1. Are you a mountain person or beach person?
2. Are you an early riser or a night owl?
3. Do you have a terrace?
4. Do you live in an individual house or an apartment?
5. Which floor is your terrace on and how big would you think it is? (Small/ Medium/ Big)
6. When do you go to your terrace and how often?
7. How long do you usually stay on your terrace and what do you do?
8. Do you work on your terrace? Why/Why not?
9. Do you wear footwear on your terrace? If yes, why?
10. Do you have a tap on your terrace?
11. Are you concerned about your privacy on terrace?
I studied through the user’s answers and noted down the pain points and the overall insigts for each user. Below are the conclusions from the answers of each user:
DEFINE
With the data to potentially provide life changing experience :p for users, it was time to analyse the answers and identify the problems, and understand WHY solving the problems was important to the users.
- No shade- limits the time spent on terrace for all the users.
- No Privacy- less privacy makes it uncomfortable for user #2 to workout/perfom yoga. Users 1 and 3 also feel privacy is mandatory.
- No comfortable working space- users couldn’t spend any time working on their terrace with no comfortabe working space.
- Disturbances on terrace- User #2 facing problems with monkeys making the terrace untidy and breaking things.
- No steps to get on top of the room- User #2 doesn’t have a stair to climb up to check water tanks, and has to perfom parkour to climb the wall.
- Terrace doesn’t have a flat surface, instead has a step- makes it difficult to walk around the terrace.
- Dry leaves falling on terrace- User #3’s have a garden around the house and dey leaves from tress fall on the terrace, and clog the rain water drain.
IDEATE
Now we get to coming up with all possible solutions for the problems, no matter how stupid an idea seems to be. :D
“Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them”
-Seth Godin (Author: Poke The Box)
I ranked all my ideas and picked the top 3 to go forward with:
- A shade net- A shade net can be fixed on one side of the terrace. This would provide some shade as well as privacy to the users. Allows growing of small pot plants and climber plants under the net, to enhance aesthetics and more vibrant surrounding. It’s not expensive.
- Table and chair under the net- A plastic/metal table and chair is put under the net, so as to provide with a seating accesibility to work as well as spend some time sitting :p
- Metal Ladder- Provide user #3 with a metal ladder fixed to the walls and ground, to ease the wall climbing experience.
Let’s take these ideas and prototype it to present to the users.
PROTOTYPE
The solution in real world would look like this:
The shade net can be built over the terrace as long as it is needed across the terrace. There are multiples shades of colours available for the net. The user can choose among them (suggestively a darker colour to block view for privacy).
In case of User #3, the nest is put on the tree side of the terrace and the top of the shade net is made slanting (30–40 deg) to make the falling dry leaves slide off tothe sides of the building.
A metal table and a couple of chairs, as such in the pictue, is put under the net.
Makes life easier by providing a provision to sit and rest, work or study (basically go about your business).
Makes evening coffee time a better one with the sunset.
User #2’s problems with climbing the wall to check the tank is solved with the help of this magic ladder below:
TESTING
This part, this part of the project is about taking the prototypes to the users and take their feedback.
User #1
“It’s a really good idea and would provide good privacy..”
The user would like to stay under the net and spend some time in case of rains aswell.
USER #2
“I like this idea..”
The user would not want the ladder to take up much horizontal space on the terrace.
USER #3
“I love how the leaves could be diverted from falling on to the terrace and over the drain..”
Ther user would like to have a table with storing facility to keep things (like laptop, mobile, books) in case of quick shuttle down to their house.
Insights from the feedback:
Rain proof shade net could be better
Reduce space occupied by the ladder
Need table with storage space, and also portable
Iteration 1:
Shade nets can be replaced with fiber shades. They dont have tiny holes like shade net, also durable and light weight.
Any side can be covered as well to block views to maintain privacy.
To reduce the space occupied by the ladder, a ladder closely attached to the wall can be used. Hard to imagine? look below:
This will serve the purpose without taking much of the space.
What did I learn?
This project has taugt me that design is only concerned about FOR WHO and not FROM WHO.
I learned that only good questions would produce good answers, and the best questions, the best answers. I learnt to question even the simplest of things without assumptions.
🍹 To more!
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