Applying Multi-sensory Design to an alarm clock
Designing a Grammar Cheatsheet
We experience the world with all our senses: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile. This project is focusing on how to combine and balance multiple senses to deliver a harmonious user experience. Went through the design process from collecting senses to making prototype, we created an alarm clock that will wake you up by multi senses, and boil an egg for you at the same time 🙂
The goal of this project is to practice the method of Multi-sensory Design theory build a deeper understanding of all senses of humans.
PROJECT
Course project: Multisensory Interaction Design @ Uni Twente
MY CONTRIBUTION
Part of the 4 people team: research, idea generation, user journey ,UX/UI design, foam model making, video production
A fun demo video to introduce the interaction flow
a screenshot of Grammar Book feature on production
a screenshot of Grammar Book feature on production
Alarm clock & morning routine.
We decided to focus on Young Professionals as our target group, and one of their needs is to have a good start of their busy day. So we expand our idea from how to wake some up to how to create the best morning routine.
After a brainstorming session, we all agreed on that a great morning routine includes some exercise, a healthy meal, and a happy mood. So Active, Healthy, Happy are the keywords of our morning routine.
Mood board built based on all senses: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile.
Then we summarized description of the objects we collected to find overlapping materials and senses.
Venn diagram of collected keywords for senses present active, healthy and happy.
User flow with multi-sensory experience
The start of a successful morning routine is getting prepared in the night before. Eggtivate encourages the user to wake up, do some exercise in the bedroom, fresh him or herself up in the bathroom and enjoy their breakfast in the kitchen at home.
Eggtivate is a system consisting of a bracelet and an associated docking station with a built-in egg cooker. The user needs to put a real egg in the docking station to activate the alarm clock. When the user is doing exercise, the egg boiler will start working. When the user is refreshing him/herself in the bathroom, the egg will be cooled down. Then finally when the user finishes his/her morning routine and put the bracelet back, the egg will be released as part of a healthy meal.
User flow with time and location changes.
The interface of the alarm clock screen is designed based on the user flow.
Egg illustrations made for the video to present the metaphor of morning routine of the egg
Design the look and feel + Prototyping
Because many interaction feedback in our design are based on tactile senses, we took reference with lots different products and tested different materials to make the final demo modal.
'First idea exploration of using ‘’Minions’ as control button around different rooms (draft sketch by Joris Prenger)
'Final idea exploration of using egg boiler and band to finish the morning routine. (draft sketch by Joris Prenger)
Making foam models, painting and print fake screen (lot of fun and muscle pain :P)
The final model (combined a kinder chocolate case) that can actually hold an egg!
Learnings & Shout-out
Haven't done any 'physical product' design for years, it reminds myself how much I enjoy creating designs that could directly interact with people. This alarm clock is definitely not a 'practical' product, but we all like it a lot :P.
Haven't done any 'physical product' design for years, it reminds myself how much I enjoy creating designs that could directly interact with people. This alarm clock is definitely not a 'practical' product, but we all like it a lot :P.
I'd like to thank my team members for our endless group meetings trying to develop a logical idea from a bunch of vague, abstract feelings of all senses. Especially Josip and Kan's awesome sketch and 3D modeling skill and Ciro's professional performing and voice-over for the video 🙂