This project is the culmination of a semester-long industry-sponsored project through the 'Design Research Practices' course at the University of Notre Dame (taught by active industry designer Ann-Marie Conrado, as a part of the Collaborative Innovation minor).

🛥WHO: The client was a boat manufacturing company headquartered in Indiana.

⏱WHEN: Over the course of the Fall semester, August-December 2021

💡WHAT: A multi-stage, human-centered design research project. Each stage is explained more fully below.

During the COVID pandemic, boat sales, in particular pontoon sales, increased massively as families looked for ways to spend time together safely. Our client was impacted by this boom, and found itself with a wealth of first-time customers. Wanting to keep this customer base in future years, they tasked us with exploring the following question:

Our class was made up of students from diverse backgrounds, ranging from computer science (me!) to business to engineering to anthropology. We formed cross-disciplinary teams to tackle our first phase of the project: research. Our research approach for this project included a number of steps:

Scope the boat-buying landscape

Identify appropriate research participants

Recruit participants and schedule interviews

Write the research protocol

Conduct ethnographic interviews and deploy generative design research techniques

Transcribe and code interviews

Synthesize "on the wall"

Present our research findings to Smoker Craft, Inc. representatives, including the VP of Marketing and the Head Engineer

Generate opportunity ideas based on our research and insights

Design Research Protocol

Interview recordings, physical artifacts, and all raw data

Transcribed and coded database of interview data

Research Findings Presentation

Opportunities Findings Presentation

Opportunity Mockups

To get a feel for the industry, we divided into groups to look at the boat-buying world from a number of different angles. We spent a few days in these teams, and presented our research findings to the entire group. The divisions were:

Boating Trends: looking at recent trends in the boating industry

Competitive Landscape: identifying the primary competitors to Smoker Craft, Inc.

Owning a Boat Experience: beginning to explore the reality of owning a boat and what it entails

Pontoons 101: figuring out what the heck a pontoon is and how it works

Armed with our initial scoping teams research, and working with Professor Conrado, we decided to look at our research population by splitting it into different 'types' of stakeholders and boat owners, whom we imagined might have different needs, wants, dreams, pain points, and aspirations in their boat ownership journey. We identified the following participant groups, and divided into corresponding teams to recruit participants:

Families with Children Owners (my team!)

DINK Owners (Double Income No Kids)

Didn't Buy a Boat - to explore some of the major pain points of boat ownership, we wanted to look at those Competitivescopingwho didn't clear that final hurdle to buying a boat

Dealerships - since Smoker Craft, Inc. is a manufacturing company, they don't typically interact directly with the end user. Boats are sold through dealerships and marinas, who are Smoker Craft's primary clients. We wanted to see what insights these establishments could provide us with regards to their customers: the actual boat owners.

For both the Families with Children and the DINK groups, we were looking specifically at people who had bought a pontoon boat in the past 2 years, since the question we were trying to answer concerned recent pontoon boat owners.

Through personal networks, professional contacts, and online boating forums, we contacted participants meeting the criteria of our demographic groups.

My team ran into difficulties finding individuals who met our criteria, so we had to expand our participant pool to those who had bought ANY type of boat in the past 5 years. With these expanded criteria, we were able to find 8 different families to participate in our research.

Before beginning our research, we drafted research protocols within our teams. My team's protocol included four activities:

Amazon Wish List: a generative research tool in which participants were asked to make an Amazon Wish List in response to the prompt "what would turn your current boat into your dream boat?"

Photo Snapshot: participants were asked to take photos of their boat, 3 things they can't go on the boat without, where they store the boat, and how they transport the boat.

Ethnographic interview: An ethnographic, narrative-based interview with questions designed to probe pain points and aspirations and tease out latent knowledge. Within the interview, we had participants map out their boat-buying journey on an emoji timeline built with Miro, and talked through it as a part of the interview.

Draw your Dream Boat: as the Families with Children team, we felt that the children should be included in the research process, as their experiences contribute to that of the family as a whole! So, we included an activity in which children were asked to "draw your dream boat", and included a brief follow-up talking through their pictures.

Following our research protocol, we conducted 8 interviews (via Zoom and in-person) over a period of 3 weeks, taking detailed notes and recording each of them with video and audio. We collected a vast amount of data, of all different types, including the two examples below.

After completing each interview, we transcribed it into an Excel database, separating each individual thought or comment into its own row. We pulled insights from the words of our research participants, and coded each piece of data with a category tag to help with synthesis, in the next phase. After spending hours putting in each and every individual piece of data, we collaborated as a team to highlight the most important insights to prepare for Phase 7.

Once we had our data collected and formatted, and had drawn out some intial insights, we began the real process of finding those resonant, surprising truths that are so central to design research. We used the "on the wall" method, printing physical cards for each piece of data, pinning them up, and using sticky notes and lines to connect ideas and trace common threads.

Through the process of synthesizing, we arrived at a number of key insights relating to our initial question. We presented these insights, along with our supporting research and explanation of our methodologies, to a number of Smoker Craft executives.

After presenting our findings, we reshuffled our teams to mix the perspectives of each research group. I was a part of the dealership channel opportunities team, and personally created the following:

Mockup website (not fully functional, but includes features that address a number of the discovered insights about the client-marina/dealer relationship) available here.

Some stills: