User Experience Intern

Siebel Center For Design

role —

UX Designer

UX Researcher

UX Design

UX Research

Prototyping

User Testing

skills —

Figma

Adobe Illustrator

tools —

timeline —

June 2023 - July 2023 | 8 weeks

The Team:

Vaani

Jaylynn

Rachel

Nathan

Helen

The Shop

The Siebel Center for Design is a campus resource dedicated to teaching and developing mindsets in:

Human-Centered Design

Their makerspace, The Shop, offers a variety of tools and workshops to help a guests creative vision come to life!

It was a very simple space where guests could come in and learn how to use certain tools and machines, and use provided tables and chairs for their workspace.

Pictures of The Shop before Summer 2023

Our UX team was put on the case to improve The Shop space and overall guest experience!

Project Overview —

How can guests better navigate our space?

Design Process —

We utilized design thinking to learn how to approach and solve the problem.

Research Phase

Ideation Phase

The campus makers space, the Shop, at SCD (Siebel Center for Design) aims to establish a welcoming and inclusive environment for individuals interested in exploring new skills and crafts.

My role as a Lab UX intern was to help to optimize the workflow for both students and staff, as well as improve the overall usability of the space and machines we offer.

Low-fidelity Sketches

Design Phase

Mid-fidelity Designs and Plans

Mid-Fi Design Options —

Prototyping Phase

The Problem —

The space gets overflooded with eager guests who wants to use the machines and materials the Siebel Center for Design has to offer. As a result, there are a mix of guests who are experienced with some machines while others are not as experienced. This causes a need for shop attendants to help and teach inexperienced students.

Using our responses, we began to develop ideas and solutions to some of the problems that came up for the staff and guests, such as what posters we need, the contents of the posters, and the materials we would use.

Research → Understand → Ideation → Design → Prototyping

We created the user surveys for both staff and students to gain a basic understanding of our users.

Based on the responses, we were able to determine:

  • Which tools should be kept behind counters and which can be put out on the floor

  • Which machines require more assistance/instructions based on users experience with a machine

  • What expectations the staff wants guests to understand before coming into The Shop

  • What the process has been like for the guests and staff so far.

These were some designs for signage we wanted to implement around the space.

These were the first variations of the signs using the SCD assets and color palette.

The Siebel Center for Design attracts many different guests, we created user personas to map and understand more about the user's wants, needs, and problems. We pinpointed their needs based off their bio, identified unique pain points, and understood their values for a makerspace.

We created some initial designs of furniture we wanted to bring into the space, layout of the spaces, and posters with instructions and policies. We worked closely with the furniture team, storage space team, and AV team in order to recognize and organize what should get done by each group.

We laser engraved a board piece with the layout of the shop and rearranged how we wanted the flow of the space to look like.

We printed several versions of signs and stickers to prototype and began user testing them to see its effectiveness in the space

THE SHOP

New and improved

Takeaways —

I was able to get an hands-on experience at working with human-centered design principles during this summer internship at the Siebel Center for Design.

At this internship, I was able to develop a comprehensive understanding of how to create and design a human centric environment, as well as gain extensive exposure to a wide range of equipment. This included working with a large format printing machine, laser cutting, and various other woodworking tools and machines.

Working with other experienced designers allowed me to gain important insight and feedback throughout our process. I hope to continue applying these human-centric design principals to other aspects of UI/UX with a passion for design thinking in order to create more creative and innovative solutions.