When you working on a UI, but occasionally invent a new process
This post is a part of a Coursera assignment for the Interaction Design Capstone project, and may be boring for anyone, except other students.
From design briefs we have I choose “Change”. I dare to change the life quality of living in a neighborhood. My first interviews was about what people wish to have in their neighborhoods, what annoying and so on. The image of a “perfect neighborhood” I’ve got is a university campus. Where you have everything you need nearby, including a company for an activity.
I shoud mention that I’m Russian, so will address some CIS-specific cases and, huh, sorry my English.
Problems and opportunities
CIS or Brasil, Belgium or US, problems was all the same — lack of something forcing you to spend time walking, driving, in public transport.
- lack of an object — children playground, parking lot, laundry, pharmacy
- lack of an activity — sports, yoga, for kids
- condition of infrastructure objects
So, my opportunity areas
For example, a big idea I didn’t really cover in the project was about collecting data from sport tracker and navigation apps. Moscow used to have a big fight about where to build bike lanes. Imagine the amont of ultimate data hidden in citizens’ smartphones.
Storyboards
@Home mobile app and system behind
On the front end we have a mobile app. In fact, it adds geotags:
- Reports — about broken streetlight or a pharmacy you’d like to see here. Other people don’t see it, but city administration and local business do.
- Activities — about a football play you’re gonna do here next Friday. Neighbors see it.
Behind this we suppose some system that collect reports and calculate recommendations. Such data may help city administration to create proposals for a next financial period, or be a cheap alternative to research for a local business. Now forget this part, all the project is about the mobile app. I called it @Home.
The idea is more or less stolen from Waze.
Questions, tasks and tests
A task walked with me through all the tests was to report something (like a broken street light). Long story short — all the types of geotags together was puzzling. So I putted “+” buttons to Activities and Forum sections and adding of a report — as a separated section.
Then it didn’t work either. So in B version I brought them all together with “How it works” page.
Well, B version didn’t show statistically significant difference. Mean time for report in B version was lower, if you interested.
Am I good in prototyping or bad in testing?
Actually my tests nearly failed. At least, I wasn’t able to propose good changes after A/B test.
What I’ve got from UserTesting.com is that my English is too bad to proceed user tests with native speakers. No one really read what is the app for, my categories names was puzzling and so on. Then, from all the test, what I already knew: people does’t read a thing. Onboarding tips, How it works page didn’t work. A/B test I did with Russian-speaking people, so sure I provided a better explanation.
And then I finally understood. Damn, it really took me all the test to understand the obvious. Any reporting flows are somewhat good. Explanation makes the only real difference. I didn’t invent a UI or elements, they all quite usual. I invented more the process itself than a tool to do it. People usually doesn’t have the suitable mental model at all.
I should create that mental model. «You put the tag city administration see it and one day do something».
Can the interaction itself:
- explain a model to new users
- be short for others
at the same time? Well, may be yes, and I just didn’t work enough on it.
Other from tests
I used a iOS guidline violation I really appreciate in some apps (for example — in Prisma). A big button on the place of menu instead of small “Next” control in the top right corner. First pair of screens is the example.
While second pair failed. Some users didn’t saw the button and was trying to tap on the icon againg thinking it didn’t work. Finally I removed the step shown on the last screen. So you tap a category and automatically move to the form.
One more thing I was testing was distance filter — how far the activities (or forum posts) you browse can be. Tests shown it‘s easy enough to find.
Reflection
All this was a surprise. Looking of a thing laying in front of me all the time. How bad my English still is. The fact I can create an idea — I’m always developing someone else’s ideas on my real life jobs. People mostly told they’d like to have such app and on the 8th week I finally got a link on the only real competitive product - nextdoor.com. It launched this year. I even started to think “may be I can really…”. But got down from heaven fast — I need another country to build such processes. Government institutions shoud have at least some tiny interest, here they’re definitely not.
Finally, it was really difficult to test a raw prototype of something where all the supposed content — is the user generated content.
Really sad it’s the end of the Capstone project, I’d like to work on graphics too. Thank you for your time.
— Acia
