Week 2 & 3 retrospective - Re:Design

We started week 2 with lots of questions about Project 2. The task that was presented to us was less structured than Project 1, and there was much ambiguity as to what needs to be done. Maybe this was why it was referred to by ZZ as the lowest point most would face in this course.

We started however with something that was familiar to us by now, creating user-flows for various personas.

Analogue user-flows, complete with all the questions, and incompleteness that comes with it.

The project also brought us to a more technical domain, understanding the Information Architecture (IA), and the challenge of re:designing the IA to be something that was more useful to the “users” we were designing for.

From 233 items to 141, I consider that an achievement (more on how below)

We did a round of card sorting, and with a sample size >30, we were quite confident that the tree testing would be a breeze.

We cant be more wrong.

When doing the tree testing, we met with diverse results and had to reconvene to discuss the results before we could move on.

This was surprising for us on many levels, as some of the users were repeated for both exercises and they still didn’t get the flow right. Maybe its true sometimes user do not know what they want. And it’s our job to dig deeper to understand more.

With that out of the way, here comes the tough part, re:designing the site.

Paper prototyping and iterations

User feedbacks

With the prototype in place, a few internal arguments between me, myself and I, backed with feedback from 2 separate users and a few iterations and< 4hrs of sleep later, I present (pun intended), SUSS -Re:designed.

Re:Design

In reference to designing, this has always been a “pain-point” for me. I am used to articulate my designs and requirements in words and to be challenged to redesign a site was nothing less than a daunting task.

However, this impact was greatly cushioned by:

1. The fact of having good teammates; despite the fact that this was an individual project, the 5 of us who were chosen for SUSS decided to take the group work all the way till the new IA was out, and hence, the mention of we/us/our throughout this post. I believe this too provided me a good start for the next project.
2. Helpful classmates, who never said no when I have queries about layout, design and using the Gandalf of an application (think the scene: “ YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!”), Axure.
3. A constant reminder of the 3Us: Useful, Usability and being Used (i.e. desired).

With that, looking forward to amazing new things in the upcoming weeks.