3. Experience Creation
Components to create an experience
Part of the series on the field of Experience Design
Part 1: Qualitative Interviews
Creating an experience for humans requires understanding how they work and act. These interaction can be discovered with a combination of research methods to deduct insights and discover opportunities.
One of the more popular method to gain insights and understand people is performing qualitative interviews. As described in the Ideo field guide (2015) “there’s no better way to understand a person’s desires, fears, and opinions on a given subject than by interviewing them.”
The process of interviewing users has been used by teams at Parc Xerox and venture capital firm The Path Forward. The Ideo’s process of interviewing five users is drastically different from Path Forward’s 30 users interviews. The main difference is the purpose of the interview, the later is for business validations. Rachel Mercer previously of Made by Many states that “Although you try your best, you can’t completely avoid bias”
One of the challenges faced with talking to people, is the potential to taint the research with bias. By using tools to open discussion and interviewing a variety of users bias can be reduced but as Rachel Mercer previously of Made by Many states “you can’t completely remove it (bias).”
Part 2: Journey Mapping
Creating a story is of no use unless the team has a shared understanding of what that story is. Mapping stories as a document creates a joint understanding of the pain points for the users that the design will affect.
Journey Mapping is defined as “the touchpoints where users interact with the service are often used in order to construct a “journey”– an engaging story based upon their experience” (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2012)
Part 3: Prototype
Idea to proof of concept
Test- build-iterate. The use of prototyping is an essential part of the design process, the “look and feel” of a product or system, that is “the concrete sensory experience of using an artefact.(Buchenau and Fulton Suri, 2000)
Prototypes can be used for a variety of purposes. Testing user interactions, product validity and proof of concept. We were developing an innovative product and needed to make sure that the high-fi prototype conveyed the concept of the product easily with potential users.
Case Study
The following is the entire prototyping stage for our Northern Heritage product development and testing.
Rapid prototyping was an efficient way for our team to deduct the features and validate our concept product.
A. Collaborative Sketching
The first phase was to conduct a collaborative speed sketching session to add features onto our teammates work. This was an effective method to ideate and discuss additional features.
This was an incredibly helpful process to brainstorm, learning by doing.
B. Paper Prototype
The second phase was to take some of the features developed in the sketches to develop a series of paper prototypes to test the idea with users. We used this process to develop the concept rather than use it as a usability test. For the purpose of validating it worked as we did not have to explain the product.
C. Interactive Paper Prototype
The difficulty in paper prototypes is the lack of digital interactivity. We used Pop to add interaction and understand the flow of the product. Once we started to get a better understanding of the product we developed the core of what we wanted to do. When testing the paper prototypes on chefs it was apparent that chefs they wanted to monetise their efforts and share the idea with their colleagues.
D. Flow design
One of the greatest investment of time was creating the flow and wireframe for the UI. Once we had a service blueprint it was easier to start creating the digital components in the program Sketch. We created a flow of the digital app taking into consideration all the features we wanted to add such as discovering new veg, funding it and watching the growing process.
E. Wireframing
The flow design created a solid base to start on the wireframes of the final UI.If we had skipped this process and gone straight from prototype to final UI it would have taken longer to develop and sketch out the areas that were not working.
Wireframing this first made it much easier to develop the final hi-fi proof of concept
F. Proof of Concept
Due to the preplanning stages of creating hi-fi sketches of the UI, it was easy to design the style and add relevant content using the Create feature in Sketch.
We chose to use the Invision App to create our hi-fi prototype due the simplicity in creating simple interaction for mobile. To bring some of the growing features to life, it would have been beneficial to have the ability to feature micro iterations with the use of animation. Although pixels allow the interaction of animation, the UX of the software is not easy to use.
This digital prototype was also our proof of concept to then open discussion to develop the product with other parties.
The chef prototype can be found here: https://invis.io/W47PNPCNV
Part 4 : Service Blueprint
A service blueprint is a detailed blueprint of the front and back end interactions of all stakeholders. The digital product was creating services before the user came on-board and the post funding service of receiving the goods that were grown by the farmers.
We needed to understand how the actions of the chefs would be related back to the farmers efficiently. The blueprint broke down visually the steps of the entire service from finding the product, funding it and ordering it. It was clear to see how each touchpoint interacted with both chef and farmer.
Next: 4. Experience Ethics
