Starships

This project investigated what Starships, Purdue’s delivery robots, can be used for outside of delivering food. The goal of the project was to expand the usability of Starships to see how they can help and support Purdue students.

Duration: 4 weeks

Role: UI/UX

(team of 5)

Tools: Figma, Miro, Canva

Deliverables: Final Presentation with responsive wireframes

What is the
Backstory?

Starships, Purdue’s delivery robots, are used throughout campus to deliver food. The goal of the project is to expand the usability of Starships to see how they can help and support Purdue students.

While doing background research on the Starship, we learned about its current features and how these features aid in the process of delivering food under different weather conditions. This would later help us understand which of the many student problems can be efficiently solved using Starships. We jotted down a couple of use cases we thought were the most important:

Road salt distribution
Solar panels
Charging Stations
Personal Assistants
Borrowing and Lending

After a lot of back and forth, we decided on a borrowing and lending system, giving birth to our Problem Statement:

.Purdue students often borrow household, hair, and cleaning appliances from each other. However, freshmen, students with disabilities, and those without cars or on-campus apartments struggle with this due to time constraints and significant spatial distances. A solution is needed to streamline and enhance the efficiency of item exchanges—addressing time, distance, and accessibility challenges for a better borrowing experience among Purdue students.

End Result

Secondary Research

In this research, we investigated usability, college, lending, borrowing, and delivery robots, in general, to determine how we can use Starships to allow students to borrow and exchange items more efficiently. We read through multiple articles about robots, lending and borrowing, liabilities, and human-human interaction with robots. After reading those articles we jotted down the main points and ideas and created our interview protocol.

Interviews

Goals we wanted to accomplish:

1. Gain an understanding of Purdue students’ current experiences with Starship Robots, including their opinions on the convenience, efficiency, and overall contribution to the campus environment.

2. Propose the idea of an intra-community delivery system and see what the overall attitude towards the concept is.

We listed our group's findings and narrowed it down to the main problems that users have faced

We then categorized our findings into subcategories so its easier to find our data and reference it.

Scenarios and Sketches

Here I included some of the sketches I did and the user scenarios our team created for the audience to get an idea of how this product would work.

Project
Reflection

During this project, I was able to learn how to brainstorm ideas with a team and decide on the pros and cons between each to distinguish the best idea. As a group, we learned how to write a proper problem statement and what elements are needed to make sure it serves the goal of our project. Documenting our project was something I hadn't done before because usually, we talk amongst ourselves and only have a little first-hand history of our thought process into the project. We conducted interviews and even created our interview protocol with our questions and follow-ups making sure we had sufficient background information. This was also my first time creating an affinity diagram and making a list of affordances. Before this project there were multiple terms I hadn't even heard of yet so I’m glad I was able to learn so much through this project.

Contributions

Back to the top

For this project, as a team, we worked on documentation, ideation, secondary research, interview protocol, data collection, affinity diagrams, sketches, and the final slides. I worked on the exploratory scenarios, storyboards, and the final design for our presentation.

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