SIGHTSEA — an underwater service
To create and test a platform or an online service that bring together drone enthusiasts, researchers and end-users of the innovations using drones was where this project started, in the end we had been on a real journey. Coming up with ideas was not a problem, but we struggled to fit our ideas into the project restrictions. In the end, we decided go with underwater drones, trying to focus on the environmental aspect. We heard about new types of underwater drones being developed for the retail marked, ones that could do much more than the AUV and heavy weight drones that pop up if you do a quick Google search. Doing some research, we found BlyEye Pioneer. Their drones are the size of a briefcase, are fairly affordable and will be even more so in the future. The drone was invented by a Norwegian that is passionate about the environment. It is still under development, but it is already getting a lot of attention.
Now that we found our drone of choice, work can begin.Working off campus there is always the challenge of finding a place to work. In the beginning of the project we found a quiet corner of Mesh in Oslo, but as winter turned into spring, the place filled up and it was no longer possible to work there. Looking around online we finally found that Tøyen had three possible places to work, and we could alternate between the three depending on our activity for the session.
We quickly realized that for our project we needed a place to meet that was easy for everyone to get to, as well as somewhat quiet and spacious. Also we did not want to pay too much for the space. Suddenly we remembered: Tøyen! This is a place that has undergone a true facelift the last few years. Now you can find all kinds of places to eat, drink, read and study. For the next few weeks we met up at “Nord og Natt”, “Tøyen Startup Village” and “Tøyen Deichman”. Now, our work could begin!
Initial research
Making an online service for drone enthusiasts and researchers is quite an open task to handle, even when keeping your head under water. The main purpose for the drone we chose to work with, BluEye Pioneer, is to make it possible for everyone to have a look underwater, with a special focus on making the ocean a safe space for its wildlife.
The drone’s creator, Christine Spiten speaks about the drone at Ted Talks. After seing her talk, we decided to send her team an email asking them open ended questions about the drone and it’s main purpose. Christine answered herself! Her answers gave us a really good starting point for our project.
“Because we have both the retail market, researchers and industrial users as a target audience, we need to find a common platform that they can utilize—with defined areas adapted to the different groups.”
- Christine Spiten
To get a better understanding of what the drone can do and how it can affect the environment, we all took a trip to a conference called “Innovasjonskraft” hosted by DogA where EGGS Design were doing a presentation of the drone. There, we were able to take a look at the drone itself. The theme for the presentation was how the drone could not only serve as a great toy for underwater enthusiasts, but help clean up the ocean. Our project mandate is making a service that can combine these activities, and we thought this drone can potentially tie it all together. Our project is finally beginning to take shape! Now all we have to do is come up with some ideas.
The survey
After doing a written interview with a drone expert and finding a very good starting point for our project, our group now needed to find some potential users for our online service and the drone itself. BluEye Robotics is an international company, but we quickly decided to stick to the Oslofjord and it surrounding area for the purposes of our project. Immedietly we thought of divers and how they could perhaps want a service for sharing stories, information, pictures and so on. We also learned from BluEye that the drone is in fact used by divers both for industrial and leisure purposes. Our first group to contact therefore became the divers around Oslo. Surprisingly, there are a lot of them in many different clubs and groups.
A natural place to start communicating with larger groups of people is Facebook. By doing a simple search, we found “Dykkesiden”, a Facebook group with 1600 diving members. We asked them if we could please post some questions for our project, and they responded by posting our survey for us themselves. The response was overwhelming!
We also sent the survey out to marine biology students at the University of Oslo, Redningsselskapet and Norges Livredningsselskap (the coast guard and lifeguards) as well as wildlife enthusiasts, fishermen and boat owners. Divers, nature lovers and lifeguards seem to be the ones who are most interested.
Workshop preparation
In our survey that we sent out to just about 2k people, we asked if someone would be willing to participate in a workshop. We sent out 12 emails, and ended up having 3 people in to work with us. The email we sent out was written in a friendly tone, with enough information to have the participants not be completely blindsided by what this is about, but also keeping it short enough to read through. Linking to our LinkedIn profiles in the email was a good way of showing recipients that we are open about who we are, without bombarding them with too much information within the email itself. We also added the address to the workshop and a link to Google maps.
Finding a place to hold this workshop would prove difficult, but with some local knowledge and a bit of conversational skills we managed to secure quite a nice place for our little exercise. “Røverstaden” is a fairly new venue for concerts and events that few people know about. The location is extremely central; near the bus, the tram, the train and even the boat. The place itself is a restaurant with a bar that has a concert hall in the basement and offices above. By inspecting the location we discovered that they have a regular meeting room on the second floor of the bar that is ideal for what we need. Luckily we managed to secure the room for our project, we even got it for free!
The plan for the workshop itself was to start off with some food and an ice breaker, asking the participants to each draw themselves on a map of the Oslofjord, depending on where they spend the most time, and then tell us about what they do there. Then we wanted to do a practical exercise having each participant dram a few ideas on Post-Its and going through them as a group. Finally we wanted each person to take few minutes and draw their ideal online service for activities around the Oslofjord and drone activities, just a simple sketch of how a webpage like that would look.
We wanted to not limit the conversation to only design or functions, but be very open minded letting the user group come up with ideas for everything, while offcourse keeping the conversation on topic. This was the plan anyway, but a group of more than ten people tend to have a mind of its own.
Here is how it went…
Workshop time!
Starting off, one participant was late and so the workshop was delayed a bit, but we just started to eat and get a good energy on the room. Once everyone was there, the introduction part of the session went off smooth, we really got some rounded participants for this workshop.
The exercise where participants were to draw their activity on a map of the Oslofjord didn’t really work as only one of them stayed within the are on the map, but having the map proved a great tool for visualisation throughout the session, so it wasn’t all bad. We had the map laminated so it was easy to pass around or even draw on with an erase marker.
Because the introduction became more verbal than we anticipated, we wanted to keep the talk flowing and left out the Post-Its for a bit just to have a conversation. Quite quickly the participants asked what kind of drone we were actually talking about, and we realised something interesting: In being careful not to lead these potential users in any way, we had left out any details about the drone. In hindsight though, that was not necessary. In fact, giving these people a little introduction of what this drone is and what it can do would perhaps have sparked some good ideas, and so we did that on the fly as best we could, and immediately there were ideas and the conversation started to flow.
After about forty minutes of simply letting these underwater experts talk we asked them to please write down their best ideas on a some Post-Its. Our assumption was that they would write maybe five notes each and that it would take no more than ten minutes. Boy were we wrong! Luckily we did not put any restraint on the participants, so they were free to write as many or as much as they wanted. After about twenty minutes, the result was a staggering 24 Post-It notes with main categories and subcategories. Upon handing them in, we had to do an impromptu card sort with everyone simply to group the similar notes together. After doing so we could see they all formed five categories of services for activities on the fjord, and an extra technical category for use of the drone.
The six categoried were:
- Findings and documentation
- Scientific research
- Teaching
- Mapping
- Fun and games
- Technical instructions and rental
Making our prototype
One of the things we ended up changing in the workshop was the part where we wanted the participants to draw their ideas for the layout of our service. Instead, we had them describe what things they would like to see on on the front page, how they would like the menu items sorted out, if there are certain things that might be lacking on theirsites they use often they think we should include on this site and so on. We ended up sketching some simple layouts on paper to get an idea of how our site should be built. We used this as our base.
After the workshop was done, we needed a bit more information to be able to set up our service, so we also did an online card sort with the users, asking them to group certain elements together as they saw fit. Based on this we could begin making a structure for the site. First off we made menu structure and a simple wireframe for the service just trying to fit everything in. Because the users we got to participate in our workshop were all divers, the aspect of helping the environment and contributing to research was not at the top of the list, but we tried to incorporate it in the service as best we could without leaving anything the divers suggested out. Our design ended up looking something like this.
Here we tried to have as much relevant info on the first page, as well as a detailed menu and a large search box. These were all wishes from the people in the workshop. What we realized, is that focusing almost solely on the function of this service left a lot to be desired in the design department.
Mixing colors together and testing fonts while also trying to fit content into the main page and make the information visible and accessible in the best way possible was time consuming. Eventually we ended up going in circles. Also, using a live web editor as a wireframing tool is not the best option. At some point an idea is used up and need to be tossed out, here we kept beating our dead design until it was beyond saving. Then, we started over.
The design
The first site we made had its challenges in the looks department, but the structure was sound. Building on this, we made a copy of the site in wix, and went in a whole different direction with the design. Parallax scrolling is hot right now, and we found that using this layout on the first page actually worked well with our service. All this information we wanted to fit in there could be stacked in a continuous scrolling page — and it looked really good! In addition, the menu was cut down to have only five elements, and the search bar was put in the top right corner. User testing showed that this location is where one looks for it, so having it in the middle of the page was completely unnecessary. Instead we placed a video on the sop of the page, showing a real dive from Blücher, a famous dive site in the Oslofjord. A picture of this is used as the front page of this article. Below that there are the articles, under that is a section telling visitors about us, and then a contact form, before finally two buttons for renting a diver or a drone. All of this is also plased in the menu on top, where choosing “Archive” or “Map” actually takes you to their own sites. This is because these to categories actually are a lot bigger than what is shown on the parralax page.
Final thoughts
Eventually, this project became a service for divers, a platform for them to share stories and sites, and maybe rent a drone. Users beond this would be regular people interested in underwater life, or teachers and students needing materials. Our goal to have it be a tool for the drone experts in BluEye wasn’t really met, this had mostly to do with the fact that we didn’t have enough time to do a follow interview with them adding their take on the service. If it is one thing we learned from this project, is that there is never enough time.
