MemoryNinja App design story
In this post I would like to share with you the entire process I went through to create MemoryNinja App. It was an amazing journey of brainstorming, various prototypes, design, iterations, refinement, and evaluations.
Everything started with the UC San Diego Interaction Design 8-course specialization on Coursera. I joined it with some curiosity of the matter, and I must say I absolutely fell in love with it on a way. I found the whole new world I am totally passionate about, and although it is a beginning and there is still loads to learn, I started the path I want to follow in my career.
The final step of the specialization was to create an App. I must admit, it was quite overwhelming at first. I was using various apps on my phone, without ever thinking how they were made!
1) Design Theme
The theme for the design was Time and Change. I was brainstorming ideas to create an interface that facilitates personal change and save peoples time. I decided to look at it in a context of learning.
Did you ever struggle with learning long strings of numbers, such as: your insurance number, employee number, social security number or credit card number?
I’ve always had this problem myself, being ineffective in my learning, and eventually giving up and putting another small note in my wallet, to have it handy. I was wondering, is it only me? I conducted bunch of interviews with people and found out it is really an issue!
I researched what are the pain points and potential solutions. I learned people spend a lot of time to memorize numbers, with an effect, that is usually lost after a short period. I browsed the Internet to learn what the specialists says about this problem. I noticed that there are two crucial things mentioned in various sources: first — to make a connection of the number you want to learn with something, because it stops to be a number, and starts to be a pattern of some sort; second — to repeat what you learned.
2) Making the App
My aha moment, was when I saw a video on YouTube of a person who learned 100 digits of Pi, which looks exactly like this: 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 … How come? I dived into the topic even more. I learned that there are two techniques he used to learn pi — Mnemonic Major System and Mind Palace. I decided to use it in my App. Mnemonic Major System is a tool that transforms chunks of digits, eg. 3 into letters and words using special code and Mind Palace (maybe you heard this term in BBC TV Series Sherlock) is a way to imagine those words in your brain and make a story out of it.
This is how the storyboards and first paper prototypes came into life.
After making the prototypes there came the moment for heuristic evaluation, which is a very comprehensive software inspection performed to identify usability problems in the interface. I was doing that through Skype with a classmate Nick, who gave me invaluable feedback about my App. I discovered that as an owner and originator of MemoryNinja, I saw it from completely different angle, comparing to him, who interact with it for the first time. It was a huge lesson for me, that even if you spend endless hours on your prototypes, there are bugs in the interface, that you have no idea about! After the whole process, I ended up with one refined prototype, that was a mix of my previous ones.
My next step was creating interactive prototype. I researched the possible tools for that, such as InVision, Axure RP, Pencil, Marvel and others and ended signing up for a month subscription with Moqups. I found some challenges on a way, including creating the visual look of the App, implementing right navigation and creating examples to interact with in this prototype. In oppose to some of my colleagues Apps, that were some sort of calendars or trackers, mine had much more logic behind it, and I found it much harder to create a dry run. In order for my App to fully work one day I will need to code it all, so that when the user enters the number it is transformed into words and corresponding pictures are provided. I could only make a fixed example to go through for now. For this stage I decided to set aside the visual look of the App and leave it as a simple black, white and blue interface. My goal was to learn if it is intuitive to use and if people really find a value in it.
Then came the evaluation again, this time on the interactive prototype. I performed in-person experiments with people and updated my prototype accordingly once again.
The last evaluation stage was an A/B test, that was done using UserTesting.com. For that, I changed one feature and create version A and B of my App. I prepared task description for the participants to go through and asked them numerous questions regarding their experience with A and B version. The task was to add new number and go through the process of number transformation. The difference was in a way how the transformation from numbers to words happens and how much freedom the user has with choosing the words.
The feedback I got was quite harsh. Although the navigation was intuitive and the task was easy to do, the way the App works and what is going on when the transformation happened using the Mnemonic Major System was a black magic for most people. I did try to onboard users with some examples and introduction of what is it all about, but it was not enough.
After all, I realized it is a niche app, mainly for people who already heard about the Mnemonic Major System and are looking for a tool to use it in practice. There is a one-time effort in order to use the App successfully, that is learning the cipher, with which the numbers are changed to words. It may seem like a lot of work, but I assure that when you transform it and imagine a story in your head even the most ridiculously long strings of numbers won’t be any problem for you anymore!
With that, I succeeded with creating my first prototype! There is still a lot of work for me to improve my skills in understanding user needs, managing projects and designing successful Apps. I am looking forward to grow in this fascinating field! I also encourage you to do this! Happy designing!
Ag.Sw