Design Task: Noise Levels
Workplaces of any kind (offices, co-working spaces, coffee shops, homes) often produce noise, which can affect human performance, creativity levels, and even health. Design a mobile application / web page to measure, track and analyse noise levels. For this design task, you are free to define your target audience.
Swallow – A noise measuring application that enables students to find the noise level of places, and develop their personal noise profile to improve their future noise measuring experience
For the design exercise, I have identified the target audience to be university students (age 21 - 26). Studying is a key activity performed by university students, and productivity is a huge factor in this activity. As explained in the design prompt, noise can play a huge role in affecting one’s performance and productivity, and I will examine the problems university students face with noise and how the problem can be tackled.
To recruit participants, convenience sampling was used, where I recruited my friends who were university students. To this end, I recruited a total of 3 interviewees (22M, 24M and 22F).
To better understand the problems that university students face with noise and how an application that measures noise levels can help them, I decided to use semi-structured interviews for the user research.
As there was a given design prompt, I felt that some form of structure was necessary to appropriately direct the interview. The nature of semi-structured interviews allows me to explore a largely unexplored space. It also enables me to further probe and explore interesting and critical events brought up by the interviewees.
Retrospective questions