Focusing our concept direction on the idea of the “safety net”, we provide the traveller a sense of security that they are connected back home and have medical records tracked and stored with him or her. This idea stems from insights acquired from interviews detailing situations where even the most adventurous traveller wanting to explore on his own can feel terrified in medical emergencies, particularly, when he has trouble communicating his situation or understanding his medical condition. I have personally found myself in this situation too in a foreign country and have felt the panic of not only trying to communicate with the local hospital staff, but also trying to connect with family back home.

Our direction will be exploring the idea of tracking the history of travel locations and medical/physiological data in order to address the health concerns of travellers while maintaining a connection with people back home.

Below is a storyboard illustrating our idealized situation with our conceptual idea.

User Testing

In general, users liked the coin bucket for dropping change all at once and especially the idea of being able to pay for a drink with a combination of coins and Octopus card. Having a touch-based screen with clear icons made it easier to make selections and updating the screen view based on context made it easier to understand (for example, only showing pictures of the available drinks). Additionally, users enjoyed ease of collecting the drink without needing to bend down to pick it up.

However, our interface and screen flow still didn’t easily support the task of buying multiple drinks or different kinds of drinks in one transaction. Thus, we re-thought our interface as a single dynamic screen to provide clear feedback of user choices and actions through animations. For ease of use, the interface supports variations of actions, whether it be simple selection and/or drag & drop, allows mistake fixes, and provides prompts to help users when no input/action has been received for a while.

Results

Fast prototyping of a physical model allowed us to quickly test and validate our ideas while highlighting problems to solve in the next iteration. In the book The Art of Innovation, one IDEO designer talks about “build[ing] to learn.” And indeed, our prototype helped us shape an improved vending machine concept that was understood by everyone and created an enjoyable user interaction and experience.