Show & Tell #ixdonline
I take a course about Interaction Design for building a prototype related with the enterprise market and the challenges about training the people and aligning their knowledge with the company’s mission. This was the development and the results:
Week 1. Design Thinking Capstone
This week was just about the project objective. Look back all the courses we made and start to think about the options we’ll have in the development of the course.
Week 2. Needfinding
We had to choose about several topics for develop the interaction design project. My choice was about change. Change in the companies through learning and a clear development plan. It’s quite common in my job to find a lot of learning sources but the path you have to follow is not quite understandable.
Coursera is a perfect example of being the catalyst on individual learning, but what about the enterprise?. There are different challenges as the access to several private lessons on providers systems plus the public resources. Once you find the right tools you have to be able to replicate the paths and update those as the market evolves.
That was my initial idea, at that week I had to observe people doing their jobs and learn more about this idea. Find the real value that was needed.
Week 3. Ideation
One of the funniest activities is to make storyboards. Through this drawings you can take out of you brain all your ideas and the things you learn on looking people. It’s quite important because you detect the steps and user will follow and why they are goint to follow those. Rather than a specific interface you are evaluating the behaviour.
After that, you are ready to start doing the mockup of your app. A basic map about how it’ll work and what features will solve the users needs.
Week 4. Prototype
Once you got the idea of the flow of actions you build a prototype. This prototype I build was oriented to understand the right steps and user will follow and how they understand it. Some interesting facts are related to the usage and new possibilities the users follow.
My initial prototype is about the training paths the people could follow and how they align to the general company strategy. I learned what changes would be convenient not only for the use of the app but to really connect the company strategy to the individual training.
Week 5. Design Heuristics
At this point, the app starts to have a clear map of how it will be. Now it was the time to digitalise all paper excersises.
After validating the flow of the training and all varieties depending on providers it was time to design a wireframe that shows a clearer design to validate it and move forward.
The Training Paths will follow two major things: Individual Training Plan and Strategy Company options to align those to the sum of all parts contributed by individuales.
This will help not only in the company global achievements but the compliance with the providers.
Week 6. A plan & a skeleton
With all the previous input, I have a skeleton of the app. It means, the general map of interactions you go through.
This skeleton gives a whole view of all possible interactions and some ideas come from the initial storyboard. When thinking about the future prototype, it’s quite useful to have in mind the flow of activities and possible routes that the user follows to accomplish their tasks.
It starts to have more design options rather than the paper and allows to validate the future interaction the app will have. It’s important at this point which paths are valide and which are not.
Week 7. Ready for testing
The app now have a full interaction option for every option available.
It was developed on InVision App and allow users to see in a more real environment how the app will be. They found they can press in any option avaliable so they had a real experience with the functionality.
Week 8. Test your prototype
With this prototype and some feedback from users it was time to use a new service for me. User Testing allows you to do A/B tests and see videos filmed by real users.
It was quite a good experience to hear people that doesn’t know anything of the app and the purpose of it rather than some basic instructions. It gives you a different vision about the behaviour of users and shows you potential changes to make.
Week 9. Results
With the final input the prototype is ready: https://invis.io/YN820LVQJ. You have received now a sequential feedback in every step of the design which allow you to have a different view that involves real user needs.
