Megan Doll
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Case Study: Charmed I'm Sure

Charm Offensive

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The Challenge

Help design a welcome gift for Prime Digital Academy full-stack students to replace their discontinued present: a water bottle that was deemed both “unusable” and “impersonal” by earlier cohorts.

Methods Applied

  • Heuristic Analysis
  • Fly-on-the-Wall Observation
  • Prototyping
  • Cultural Probe

Tools useD

  • Pen & Paper
  • Found Materials
  • AdobeIllustrator
  • PowerPoint

Background

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Prime Academy understands that their immersive bootcamp-style programs are a huge undertaking for students. Once students are on campus, they typically clock between 60-80 hours a week working on their projects. Students spend long days working alongside one another in the classrooms and socializing in the common areas.

Keeping up with the demands of the program requires a major lifestyle change for most students. For many, the program marks an inflection point in their lives—a period of transition between one identity and the next.

Design Concepts

Informed by our fly-on-the-wall observations of full-stack students, we generated the design concepts below. After a round of dot-voting, public opinion coalesced around the middle concept, Charmed, I'm Sure.

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Insights

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To better understand what would make the design more meaningful, we created a cultural probe kit to draw out nuanced reflections from our sample users.

Some key insights unearthed by our research were:

  • Students enjoy personalizing their workspaces.
  • Students come from a wide range of backgrounds, but share many cultural touchstones.
  • Students are eager to make both personal and professional connections.
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DESIGN SOLUTION

Inspired by wine glass charms, our design team created an all-purpose Prime-branded bottle that students can customize with a charm of their choice. The charm not only adds aesthetic interest to the water bottle, but gives students a playful-yet-practical way to signal which bottle is theirs. (One research participant remarked that the charm could also be used to distinguish student's fobs.)

Provided on their first day of class, the bottle serves as a welcome gift, reflection prompt, activity, and ice-breaker all in one. 

At a liminal moment in the their lives, Charmed, I'm Sure invites students to explore who they were, who they are, and who they will become.