Research Process and Methodology

Strategy

The market for relationship aiding apps is already very saturated in terms of catering to the established relationship. We decided that a market that had yet to be catered to would be the relationships yet to appear - those that are in the dating scene. We had several potential targets within this space, but decided that the users that needed the most help were those in a high velocity situation of the dance club.

Research Interviews

We interviewed groups of individuals regarding their experiences, trials and tribulations of attempting to initiate contact (or to avoid contact at all) while going clubbing.

Common themes that emerged included

• Dealing with loud sounds - the lack of ability to talk to partners

• Dealing with disorientation due to alcohol

• Dealing with lack of memory of communications due to alcohol

• The frustration of remembering names

One factor that sparked the team’s interest was this particular quote that introduced the aspect of play and discovering a different sense of self while going clubbing.

Primary Research

Our team went in person to experience the clubbing scene and discovered some other important aspects to consider in criteria for our design:

• Dealing with disorientation in the dark

• The cattle herding of staying with your group and finding stray friends, or finding the friendgroup when lost

• Safety Concerns, especially when Clubbing While Female

Form Factor

With the Peacocking “showing off stickers” as an inspiration, and since the idea of Self-Transformation factored so strongly as a reason for going clubbing, we decided that a good way to incorporate an assistive interface would be to embed it in the things that would be most commonly seen in a club and which would have the highest impact visuals on a user’s body.

We narrowed it to five objects of interest to form our suite of products:

1. Dress / Shirt

2. Shoes

3. Pendant

4. Wand / Baton

5. Tattoo

Gesture Design

Since a commonly cited problem was inebriation and disorientation, we wanted to make the gestures easy to remember via incorporating naturalistic gestures that would be able to transfer between each of the 5 objects without much adjustment. For instance:

1. Turning On - “Zip” up the middle of the garment to turn it on

2. Transferring Contacts - Brush from your device to the other party

3. Move a Contact to Save - Pinch the “sticker” to select it and then hold to your “pocket” where the phone is stored.

4. Deleting Contacts - Pinch to select, then brush it rapidly as if you are “brushing Dirt off” to remove the contact

CRUSH wireframe

Touch-based gesture controls on the family of devices allow the user to interact directly with the phone app without having to use the screen. App controls allow finer control of additional features: the Compass Mode is activated via functions on the app.