Steely of the Strip

  • Steely is an interactive kiosk for the popular Strip district in Pittsburgh. The aim of this kiosk is to encourage sales during the week. This kiosk is a way to engage adults and kids motivate them to explore more shops.

  • This moodboard of the Strip disrtict gives an idea of how lively this place is. However, this place is stranded on weekdays.

  • As the Strip district is a busy place, our first task was to find out whether a kiosk would even be noticed here. We used intervention observation technique to find that out.

  • We conducted grounded brainstorming sessions, sketched several ideas and validated them.

  • Speed dating sessions helped us identify the good and bad aspects of our design. This was a quick way to find out which of the ideas would be accepted easily by users.

  • The information architecture represents the basic flow of interactions while using Steely.

  • The journey map represents how Steely would play a role in shopping. Please visit the process site below for more details.

Project description

'Steely of the Strip' was a three week long final project for our Basic Interaction design class. The aim of this project was to build a kiosk to add value to or address some need of any place in Pittsburgh. Our team chose to build a kiosk for the Strip district - a cultural landmark in Pittsburgh known for its shops and goodies. What I liked most about this project was the freedom we enjoyed in coming up with ideas for the kiosk.

Process

We conducted multiple site visits to assess the need for a kiosk, guage the culture existing in the Strip district and understand the goals of the vendors and customers over there. The greatest challenge we faced for this project was that the people seemed to be content with the Strip district and the prevalent culture there. Hence, to evaluate the potential success of a kiosk being accepted and noticed we used an innovative idea for intervention observation.

Design

We designed a kiosk to encourage visitors to explore the shops in the Strip district, improve business during weekdays and make shopping fun for children. Our design was a walk up and use kiosk which would dispense steely cards. Every time visitors bought anything in a store they would receive a cool stamp. At the end of the visit they could insert the card into the kiosk which could sense the stamps and give discount coupons accordingly or cool sticker cards for the kids. This kiosk intentionally had human like behavior to attract attention in a subtle way and encourage passers by to user it. Please view the video sketch to view our design idea in detail.

Process site