By Brian Lim
Take a moment to think about the most important part of your day, now imagine a free tool that allows you to engage and enhance that aspect of your day.
Problem
The most important part of Dane’s (participant) day is learning about UX. Throughout his typical day, he is heavily impacted and frustrated by commute time and cost.
Hypothesis
I believe that by creating a free UX learning tool that can be done anytime and anywhere for Dane, we will achieve amplifying the most important aspect of his day.
Process
Discover + Define
User Interviews helped me to understand Dane on a personal and behavioral level, ultimately leading to what is most important to him.
Affinity Diagramming allowed me to organize my thoughts, narrow down my focus, and identify trends, patterns, and themes. This was a critical moment for me because I initially began trying to solve too many problems in an assignment that was asking to solve one. This led me to interview him again, narrowing the focus, and one of the key questions asked was “What is the most important part of your day?”
Develop
After narrowing my focus with Affinity Diagramming, I created a storyboard to generate scenarios of what the user is trying to achieve, in what environment, in what context, and what leads them to use this application. User interviews concluded that Dane seeks to learn throughout the day as much as possible about UX design and how he can add skills to his resume, giving him the confidence to talk about them in an interview and then using these skills in a future job. Dane expressed that between class and his dog, he only has time to partake in additional learning on the weekends.
Features
My approach behind the features is to create a persuasive application encouraging positive behaviors. Using an ‘optimal challenge’, the user won’t be driven away by too easy or too difficult tasks; also motivating them with a sense of mastery, competence, and completion. ‘Sharing’ promotes a sense of community. All of which are ‘rewards’ to the individual.
Deliver
Prototyping allowed me to visualize what is possible, stick to addressing the problem, and move me closer to making a usability test possible prior to the delivery date. While prototyping, I began with the end in mind. A successful and admired UX Designer once told me with regards to the design, “Making a user sign-up before they have been able to experience the value of the app is a downer.” Which led me to pages 1 & 2:
Now that the lo-fidelity wire-frames were complete, I could now move on to conducting a usability test with a random participant to guide them through a task scenario that would provide valuable feedback. The user’s flow produced questions like what they did and did not expect, what they would change, and why? I discovered that when she clicked on the logos in the “Portfolio”, she expected to see previous designs. The second discovery is that she mentioned that “SAVE” should be on the bottom, she doesn’t know why but she feels like it makes sense there. This intuitive feedback was valuable.
In short, the application works by generating a new UX related challenge each time the application is launched, inspiring the user to write, sketch and/or draw their challenge on paper, and taking a photo to save it to their portfolio. This application is designed for newcomers to the UX field who need more experience with wire-frames, user flows, drawing, sketching, alignment, and applying the foundational skills.
Results
I learned how easy it is to want to solve multiple problems. I learned how to not stay married to one idea and this includes not just the problem you’re trying to solve but also for example the sketches, so you’ll feel comfortable crumpling that piece of paper up, throwing it in the trash (or in a pile for that day you look back at your old designs and wonder what you were thinking), and grabbing a new sheet. As any new endeavor, I learned how critical it is to try everything, realize your strengths and weaknesses, and address both. I learned how important it is to trust the process, the foundation that’s been laid down by others before me. The applied use of the Double Diamond design process was a wonderful experience. Adaptation. Adapting to scrapping an entire idea and pursuing a different route, adapting to time constraints, and adapting to the change to be considered after testing.
Conclusion
With the feedback I received from my peers, I will evolve this idea by considering these changes:
-Add a feature that allows beginners to connect with other beginners.
-Allow the user to view examples uploaded by other designers.
-Add daily UX video, article, image.
-Add an option to add a time constraint to challenges. The time constraint would not be adjustable, it would be set based on the recommendations of an experienced designer.
