Pitt Find
Your Ride
Introduction
This project had the goal of creating a prototype that would solve a problem for the students at the University of Pittsburgh. All of the prototypes were made to answer the question: How might we connect students at Pitt to carpool long distances? There were many different iterations and design processes employed while we designed the prototype which led us to the final design.
Interviews
Our group conducted two rounds of interviews to decide what the biggest pain points for our end users were. The first round was mainly used to decide the big topics about an app or website that would connect students for carpooling. This is where we found out that most of the interviewees noted that they would rather carpool long distances than short distances. They said that there was enough transportation infrastructure on and around campus to travel without problems, but it was hard for them to travel home for breaks and holidays without a lot of issues. This showed that we needed to go in the direction of designing a way to connect students who were planning to drive home for the holidays, with other students who wanted to go to a destination near the driver's. This first round gave us a lot of useful feedback, so we were able to get a pretty good idea of what problem we needed to solve after we evaluated the responses.
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The second round of interviews focused on the design of the solution that was the best option to proceed with. We had made our three prototypes: Google Form, Google Site, Mobile App. We showed these to the interviewees and the majority of them chose the mobile app as their favorite prototype. Their allowed us to decide on using the mobile app to create our final prototype.
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Prototypes
Below are images and descriptions of each of the different sketches and prototypes that we created during our design and ideation process.
Pitt Find Your Ride
This first image shows one of our early ideation steps where we created ideas about our prototype by using a word to focus our ideas. We grouped our ideas into different sections to decide which of them seemed like the best idea.
Rough sketch Google Site
This is s sketch of what we thought our Google Site might look like. The site would be another prototype to showcase what an app or website we could create might look like.
Google Form
This is the first iteration of our Google Form. It showcases the final questions that we created which we deemed would give us the best feedback on our ideas. We used this to see where we needed to go with our prototype.
Mobile App
The Mobile App was the most functional prototype created. It allowed the user to click on buttons to see the different pages of an app that would be used for carpooling. The users could navigate between pages and see a simulated experience for off campus carpooling.
Rough Sketch Google Form
This shows a mock-up of our google form that has questions for our end users. The questions were designed to give valuable feedback to our group about what problems students face with carpooling at the current moment, and how they would like to see this fixed.
Rough Sketch Mobile App
This sketch shows the app that would allow students to connect with each other and carpool long distances. The app had the goal of being interactive at this time.
Google Site
This Google Site was created as a way to create a visual for a website that would allow students to carpool together. It demonstrates the types of filters that would be available to choose from.
Final Prototype
Our final prototype was a physical model of the mobile app that we had created in the earlier prototyping stages. To make a physical prototype, we utilized the resources in the makerspaces. Our group used a publicly accessible 3D model of an iPhone 16 Pro Max through Bambu Labs Studios. Once we had to model picked out we used the 3D printers in the makerspace to print the replica of the phone. This was the most important step to bringing our app out of the digital space into the physical world. We decided to print out the pages from the mobile app onto the 3D printed phone to give users a chance to see what it would be like to have the app on their phone. Our group utilized the makerspaces in the basement of Benedum Hall to cut out pieces of phone core that size of the phone screen. We then printed the different pages of the mobile app and adhered them to the foam core. Finally we put piece of Velcro onto the phone and screens so they could be switched out and the user could get a feel for what it would look like to use the app on their phone.
This is a similar 3D model to the one that our group chose. We picked a model of the iPhone 16 Pro Max from Bambu Labs to print in the makerspace. We decided on the model that used 10% infill and we used the white PLA filament that was available.
These are the four foam core screens that we cut out, and the final print of the iPhone model. The blue piece of Velcro was adhered to the iPhone. We then attached small Velcro dots to the backs of the screens so they could be easily attached and removed to the phone.
After we had cut out the screens, we printed the pictures of our mobile app which we had originally designed. We glued these to the screens and made sure that it was easy the Velcro dots held without much problems. This was our final iteration which met the requirements of being physical, to help the end users have a first look at what an experience using our mobile app could be like.