I apologize for the late update, I’ve been occupying myself with other projects along with my senior capstone. From this point on, I’ll be more prolific and be on top of keeping the updates coming.
First off, thank you Justin and Mike for your feedback.
When I first decided to work on shopping carts as my Senior capstone, I have to be honest I haven’t thought much about the shopping experience at all. I saw the opportunity to redesign a shopping cart because I saw it as a good fit for ID project (it had a lot of “meat” to play with, according to my professor) and also because those things haven’t changed much ever since when they first came out in the late 1930s. Justin’s comment though made me realize that shopping carts are really just part of the entire shopping experience. As a result, I’ve been talking with my professors and my IxD classmates for the past week and seriously considered working with one of my classmates to make this into a ID + IxD group project because I felt that shopping experience design will be a too big of a project to handle on my own. However, at this point again I’m steering towards designing just a shopping cart because after talking with people and spending many nights conceptualizing I’m starting to feel that if I were to go into shopping experience, even if I picked a specific store, the project will easily get out of hand just like what Mike said.
I am personally much more interested in product design than experience design even though I see that both ID and IxD go hand in hand in terms of offering users experience. I understand that this will go into my portfolio as a major conversation piece and I feel that I will have more things to talk about when I design a solid product rather than people’s behaviors. I will of course still pay attention to shopping experience in general but I plan on spending most of my time on developing the cart.
One thing that bothers me greatly though is the fact that many shopping cart designs that are already out there haven’t really took off because I feel like they just focused on making a killer cart and left out the shopping experience… Justin you mentioned about putting a few bells and whistles on shopping carts won’t make much difference in terms of their design and I agree. There is only so much that you can do with shopping carts unless you bring a dramatic change to the entire shopping experience. Do you guys think that there are still room for improvements for shopping carts? I would hate to design just another fancy shopping cart that will get buried with other shopping carts that’s already out there…
