Last spring I took a New Product Development class at UC Berkeley and worked on a team to design a new notebook. I recently revisited the project, making an updated prototype for a friend. Here's a video:
Here are some excerpts from our final report that explain the decisions and research behind the design of the DesigNotebook as well as elaborating on two additional digital pieces of the design:
We interviewed two dozen users in a broad range of categories--professionals, artists, designers, architects, and engineers. In analyzing our interviews, we found several core user needs. Breaking them down into categories using frameworks such as CCAQ and Use, Usability, and Meaning helped us hone in on the core issues beneath specific needs as well as helping us identify different types of needs.
Sustainable design is a large part of any designer's concerns. Particularly in the field of paper products, sustainability is key. We found that our DesigNote prototype was ideal as a paper product because of its modularity; often we found that users didn't finish their notebooks. With the DesigNote, this could potentially never be the case.
Making the final DesigNotebook prototype was a matter of detail design. Choosing materials and refining the binding system and overall construction were the main tasks. We mimicked a user’s paper selection, from watercolor to graph paper, to demonstrate the variety of usages our product would have. Adding tracing paper, for example, allowed us to demonstrate that a user could draw something in their notebook and then trace that image in a single notebook. Taking inspiration from Moleskine, we found a cover material similar to oilcloth to make the notebook feel valuable.
Refining the removable binding system was a big challenge. Our original idea was to have a removable binding attached with velcro on the front and back of the notebook, but we found that the ends of the covers do not come together when you open the book; the pages bubble out instead of laying flat. We currently have this removable binding slip into some guides on the back cover so that the binding can slide, allowing the covers to come together. This solution still needs refining, but it is a major step forward.
The final concept is a suite of three products. The modular notebook concept was one of those products. Because the notebook, the DesigNotebook, is accordion-style, each page is connected to the next instead of a back binding. This allows the user to stretch all the pages out to view multiple parts of the notebook at once. We created a system to also allow users to remove or insert paper, making the notebook fully customizable and essentially everlasting. Because the binding is no longer needed except to hold the covers together, we can move it around so that the user can reorient the notebook and use the backs of the accordion-style pages. This solves a need of having multiple notebooks by putting them together, while still keeping them separate.
We refined our hybrid solution into the DesigNote app, featuring a notebook tagging feature inspired by Microsoft Tag that easily crosses the analog to digital gap whilst supporting the existing culture. DesigNote End of Life archives notebooks while allowing users to view all of the tagged content in the context of their entire notebook. While not entirely dependent on one another, this suite of products works best together. The DesigNotebook has removable signatures that can be easily scanned (especially through a feed scanner), and having multiple areas of your notebook open at once allows users to access much of their tagged digital content with speed and ease. We felt that these products should be relatively independent, though, because the one thing that all of our users did was design in their own unique way.
The app and End of Life demos were developed as a series of Keynote presentation slides. Running through the slides demonstrates a user experience. Ian made an iPhone app demo with vector-based images in Photoshop. Betsy and Darren made the End of Life demo with Photoshop and Keynote, embedding videos and media to make it look like our scanned notebook pages were really displaying the tagged media. While we have not thought about the software architecture or how to actually make these programs, the “Wizard of Oz” prototype helps us not only demonstrate our concepts, but critique them to find ways of improving the products. Indeed, sharing our concepts with some of our interviewees prompted new questions about usage.
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