Tile
Consulting project via Berkeley Innovation
Timeline: September 2020 - February 2021
Skills used: User research, industrial design, CAD (Fusion 360), rendering (Fusion 360)
Through on-campus design consultancy Berkeley Innovation, I worked with the Product team at Tile alongside three other consultants to propose industrial design changes aimed at providing a comprehensive solution to keeping track of and protecting the most valuable belongings of millennials and generation Z. Using the human-centered design process, we ended up with the Tile Lock aimed at providing users peace of mind by securing and tracking the bags that store their most valuable items during travel.
Process
Research
First, we conducted extensive research among our immediate college community and beyond through surveys and interviews to gauge what kinds of belongings they value the most as well as their as well as their attitudes towards the existing functionality Tile products offer.
Word cloud of the most valuable belongings reported by survey respondents
Synthesis
We developed four user personas that encompass the fundamental pain points we saw appear over and over again in our research. They each focused on the realm of tracking pets, visual stimuli for tracking devices, travel, and theft.
Personas synthesized from user research. Jane = tracking pets, Paul = travel, Angela = visual stimuli for tracking devices, and Alex = theft.
Ideation
Each consultant sketched industrial design solutions for each of these personas. Ultimately we decided to move forward with the persona whose main pain points are related to traveling and keeping track of important belongings and documents in transit and develop higher-fidelity prototypes and illustrations for this persona. Our main ideas include the Bending Tiles, which flex to stick onto curved or bendable surfaces such as water bottles and passports, and the Tile Lock, which secures bag zippers and acts as a tracking device at the same time.
Bending Tile: Single-Axis sketches and low-fidelity model
Bending Tile: Band-aid sketches
Bending Tile: Square sketches
Tile Lock low-fidelity models
Convergence
After getting feedback from our clients, we found out that their most successful products are those that have an unambiguous use case that is communicated well through affordances in the design. This eliminated the Bending Tile design because it had too many possible use cases that would minimize the original intention of designing a product to aid in travel. We focused our efforts on improving the design of the Tile Lock, which had a much narrower use case and thus we thought would be a higher impact design.
Bending Tile: Single-Axis high-fidelity render that ended up being unused
High-fidelity render of Tile Lock
3 Key Contributions to the Group
1. Interviewed Tile users and non-Tile users regarding their attitudes towards item tracking and tech privacy
2. Sketched concepts ideated from personas synthesized from user research
3. CAD-modeled and rendered concept ideas in Fusion 360
Outcomes:
The final Tile Lock design follows the monochromatic colors, plastic exterior material and matte finish of existing Tile products. We added LED lights to the design to add additional sensory stimulation when users need to look for their bags and luggage. Although the lock is intended for traditional operation with a physical key, it contains the same Bluetooth tracking functionality present in other Tile products that currently exist in the market. We are still looking to present this concept to the internal Tile Product team to see if this concept is one worth pursuing as a company.
High fidelity render of Tile Lock on a suitcase