Project Overview

Prime Digital Academy needed a new water bottle to gift their full stack students, after the water bottle that was previously used stoped being manufactured. I took on the project of redesigning a water bottle that would cater to student needs.Findings

 

 
 

Review

Prior to redesigning the bottle, I needed to learn more about the bottle as well as water bottle use amongst Prime full stack students.

To learn more about water bottle use of Prime Students, I performed Fly On the Wall observations. I quickly learned that expensive electronics namely Mac Laptops were everywhere. This heavily influenced my redesign.

Additionally I performed a Heuristic Analysis utilizing Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles. I learned that the previous bottle was good, but could be improved upon by making the bottle more carry-able and creating a better lid. This influenced my redesign as well. 

Design

Utilizing my findings I came up with three water bottle concepts.

After receiving feedback on the concepts, I moved forward with the self balancer, and created a low-fidelity prototype. This prototype allowed me to test the self balancing feature as well as the lid.

 
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Evaluation

To see how this concept would work for students, I conducted a Contextual Inquiry test. My goals of the test were to determine the following:

The bottles ability to balance

  • Does it tip over? 
  • Is this a useful feature? If yes, why? And if no, why not? 
  • What challenges may arise by the result of a water bottle having this feature?

  The ease of utilizing the lid 

  • Is the lid/opening identifiable? 
  • Is the lid easy to use? 
  • What challenges does having this type of lid present?

Findings

I learned that students really liked the water bottle. 

There were a few concerns noted during my usability test. There was concern that the current lid would make the bottle not dishwasher safe, there was also concern about ensuring that the placement  of the button to open the lid was conducive to one handed use. From this I determined that a high fidelity prototype needed to be created that would keep all of the previous features as well as, allow students to test out the lid button, get a real sense of how the bottle would feel in the hand, and would feature a dishwasher safe top.