Fall 2009 / Independent Project / Institute of Design
An interactive tool that helps designers and researchers quickly create and identify meaningful 2x2 placement maps. Try it out!

The problem
2x2 maps are useful tools in various stages of the design process - from evaluating competitor offerings, to scenario planning, to assessing concept generation coverage - as they allow designers and researchers to explore the distribution of items or concepts across multiple dimensions. The most challenging part of creating 2x2 maps, however, is selecting pairs of axes that produce meaningful maps - that is, maps that produce trends, clusters, and opportunity spaces. Selecting the right axes often involves extensive trial-and-error.

The PlacementMap tool
PlacementMap allows designers to brainstorm several axes that may possibly produce interesting 2x2 maps, and automatically generates tiny, easily-scannable thumbnail maps that allow designers to quickly pick out the most meaningful results. The latest version of PlacementMap is available online.

The most notable change from earlier prototypes is the increased use of direct manipulation to order items along a given axis during the scoring phase, in a process similar to a Q-Sort.

Research and development approach
I began this independent research project with Professor Vijay Kumar in Fall 2009 after developing an early, proof-of-concept prototype in Spring 2008. After analysing existing mapping and visualization tools, I conducted paper-prototype testing with design students to better understand how they intuitively approached the process of 2x2 mapping. The testing revealed user preferences for selecting an axis and evaluating all items along that axis at once, as opposed to selecting one item and evaluating it along all possible axes at once.

Armed with the findings from the paper prototype testing, I designed and developed an interactive prototype to use in a round of usability testing, aimed at understanding the appropriate flow, feature set, and interaction paradigms that fit best into designers' existing processes. This was followed by the development of a refined prototype, which was made available for designers and researchers to remotely test in the context of their own ongoing projects.

All development was done in Adobe Flex (Actionscript 3.0 and MXML).