With such a large group and such little time, I knew getting everyone on the same page and having everyone feel invested at the level of thought capital would be important in order to maximize the potential of the project and the brief time we had to complete it. We spent the first day running through an abbreviated and customized version of a Design Thinking process, which included several rounds of brainstorming to come to rough storyboard, visual theme, and core user experience and design principles. Here are some of the concepts we landed on that would guide us as we shaped the experience:

Given that the timeline of the project was only 10 days, we had to be strategic about what technologies/features would give us the biggest bang for our buck. We completed an impact/feasibility chart with our brainstormed features to create our first cut. Then, we proceeded to assign the high impact features with unknown feasibility to teams and spent a 2 hour sprint vetting a feature. We quickly saw many things that worked and many that didn't. A couple wins included discovering the immerisive potential of the Subpac and the impact of adding an audio channel synced with the user's heart beat—which we eventually found to feel more relevant than Heart Rate Variability (HRV) in the context of our VR experience.

With the Tableau prototypes serving as my blueprint, I made some quick outlines of add-on features in Sketch and then proceeded to build the web application. I evaluated Angular.js, React.js, and Vue.js as possible frameworks for the application and settled on Vue.js because of the balance of simplicity and flexibility that I felt paired well with the needs of this project.