Milestone 3 – Considering the details

By Gabriel Da Silva Marques May 4, 2018 Discover Guido project

Hello everybody!

We presented our progress at MS3 about a month ago. Since then, we’ve been working hard trying to deconstruct and implement all the feedback from our supervisors. Here’s a summary of what happened.

Our starting point for this milestone was the following MVP:

Build a device that makes music learning fun for kids.

The only problem now was that none of us in the team were actually good musicians, let alone knew how to teach music! This meant that we had no other choice than to reach out to established music teachers and schools to understand the current ecosystem. Given that we had started collaborating with Espace Musical (a DIP-accredited music school for students up to 16 years old), we did everything we could to be invited back to attend a music theory course. One week later, we were in a classroom with children between 4 and 6 years old and watching them learn. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for opening their doors to our team, we learned a lot and the experience really helped build a foundation on which to build our prototypes!

So…What happened at MS3?

Well, this time at HEPIA, we presented Sonica to our supervisors. A slightly better prototype built after the use case presented at our demo for MS2. While preparing for the third milestone, we really concentrated on developing and presenting an interesting business model, demo & use case. The engineers came up with a cool and functional prototype while the designers focused on 3D printing and researching materials compatible with the tiny hands of kids. A few days before the deadline, we had a meeting to bring everything together. That day, we were able to come up with a pitch showcasing progress from each team and a few slides at the end presenting the prototype.

Demo slide from our MS3 presentation

Demo slide from our MS3 presentation

At the end of our presentation, we realized that our pitch had not really hooked any of the supervisors. The issue was that we were showing off our work rather than the product itself.

The first and most insightful feedback was from Lysianne Léchot Hirt from HEAD:

Less is more! You have too much information and not enough storytelling of the product.

That was true. On the business side, there was too much information to digest on the slides in addition to explanations. Also, the elevator pitch needed to be simplified.

On the technical side, the explanations and diagrams were maybe oversimplified.

On the design side, the supervisors liked what they heard but remarked that our visual presentation needed improvement. We had to really start thinking about the branding, actual interaction and basic sound design for feedback.

All in all, the presentation contained over-whelming details which were not always relevant and cluttered the essence of the device. The key take-away for our team from this third milestone was that verbal communication about the product is as important as what we created visually and physically. Keep it simple, functional and interactive.

With all that to take into consideration, we got to work on the next prototype for the next milestone. That’s it for now!

Stay tuned for our posts about MS4 and other recent developments!

Cheers!

Team IKARE