GloMirror

Kickoff Meeting ✍️

The official kickoff meeting is typically held to establish a project by meeting with business stakeholders; however, as this is a class project, our team did not have the opportunity to meet with any potential stakeholders. To simulate a real kickoff meeting, we used a worksheet provided by our instructor to put ourselves in the position of a stakeholder. This allowed us to create a problem statement with various assumption statements, which we used to launch our project. During a detailed discussion about our smart mirror’s goals and future projections, we utilized the kickoff meeting worksheet to guide us.

Literature Review 📚

The Literature Review is a critical research step in GDD, providing designers with a thorough understanding of the product's context. It helps the team conduct effective interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and stakeholders, and gain better knowledge throughout the design process.

Competitive Audit 🤺

During the Competitive Audit phase of GDD, we analyze and compare existing competitors in the product domain. This process helped us identify potential competitors in the beauty and smart mirror industry and allowed us to incorporate features that competing applications lacked. We reviewed four smart mirrors. We then compared them side-by-side in a chart that illustrated several important features. This information was taken into consideration during the design process to ensure that our product had the necessary features to stand out in the market.

Competitive Audit Chart Comparing Various Features Across Competitors

We designed two different charts. One of them illustrates whether or not the mirror has the feature, and the second chart focuses on how effective that feature was implemented into the mirror. Color-coding was used to determine the effectiveness of each feature. Green means the feature is effective, yellow means it is somewhat effective, and red means it is not effective at all.

Stakeholder Interviews 🤝

As GloMirror is a class project, we were not able to conduct stakeholder interviews; however, we learned that stakeholder interviews are a valuable opportunity to gather more specific information from those with authority or responsibility for the product. These interviews can cover topics such as the product vision, budget constraints, technical limitations, and stakeholder perceptions of the users. If we were able to conduct stakeholder interviews, some example questions we would have asked include:

Subject Matter Expert (SME) Interviews 💬

Although not required for the class, we believed conducting a SME interview was essential. A SME is someone with extensive knowledge in a specific field, and we sought to gain a deeper understanding of both the technological aspects of a smart mirror and the beauty domain. As a result, our team conducted three SME interviews, two of which had experience in the beauty domain and one with experience in technology and working with smart mirror use cases.

Snippet of What We Learned ✂️

For one of our SME interviews, we spoke with Sandeep Mehta, a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. We learned about the two types of smart mirrors: general and specific use cases. Mehta explained that general use cases include basic features like checking the weather, viewing the calendar, etc. Specific use cases, on the other hand, are tailored to a particular use and have features that cater to that use. Mehta gave an example of a smart mirror she worked on with optometrists that had augmented reality (AR) features, which allowed users to see what glasses would look like on their face before purchasing them. Overall, Mehta's insights were invaluable, and with the information she provided us, it guided us to include general features for our smart mirror (i.e., weather, time, etc.). Our other SME interviews were just as informative in guiding our design decisions, but instead, it was catered towards beauty such as adding a lighting feature with different temperatures.

Our Observations

During our analysis of the affinity maps, we observed that most participants desired a lighting feature due to the different effects of various lightings had on their makeup. In addition, the majority of participants preferred to use media while doing their makeup, such as listening to music or watching YouTube tutorials. Although we discovered some common themes, there were also differences in preferences, such as some participants being receptive to product recommendations while others felt like they were being pressured to purchase something. Overall, we gained valuable insights into the participants' characteristics, thoughts, and behaviors during the user interviews.