UX Design Challenge — Introduction & Project Kick-off
I’m announcing the kick-off of a personal UX design project and I plan on sharing the entire process in bite-size pieces.
I’m doing this to learn as much as I can about the User Experience process and improve my UI skills, but also for another greater reason: Testing the app’s main assumption on myself, which is:
By publicly committing to a goal, you have more chances of achieving it.
Can self-imposed social pressure motivate you to achieve your goals? Or will it just freeze you in your tracks, resulting in failure?
By committing online to a schedule and having a clear objective, I’ll be testing this assumption first-hand. So either if I’ll succeed victoriously or go down in flames, it will be publicly.
I plan on sharing each Friday a new lesson, and hope that the entire process will take about 7–8 weeks. By the end, I’ll have a complete case study, an interactive prototype of the app and a story on Medium for each week.
So without further ado, let us begin.
Challenge
We live busy lives. We go to work for at least 8 hours a day, get back home after a long commute, eat, and sleep. We try to have a decent work-life balance and even an active social life. But where does this leave room for our own personal goals and how can we maximise our chances of achieving them?
We’ve all been there. We set a goal, make a plan, get excited, start doing the first steps, and then… something happens. Wether it’s a tragic event, your daily schedule getting busier, or just lack of energy and motivation, it’s just another reason to delay.
But what if you could use a method that instantly takes you out of your comfort zone, by leveraging your reputation?
Psychologists call this a Commitment device, and it’s present in legends and stories from all cultures, from ancient asian commanders burning down their ships to be sure they can’t retreat from battle, to pirates tying themselves with ropes to their boat to not be seduced by sirens. Why not integrate this concept into an app?
Solution
An app that helps you achieve your goals by putting you on the spot and leveraging your chosen social circle as external motivation.
Process
I’ll be using the five-phase Design Thinking model proposed by the Institute of Design at Stanford, also known as d.school. The five phases are:
- Empathize — with your users
- Define — your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
- Ideate — challenge assumptions and create ideas for innovative solutions
- Prototype — start creating solutions
- Test — your solutions
Design Thinking isn’t always a linear process, so I‘ve also allocated 2 Iteration sessions, in case changes need to be made.
Hint: If you want to learn more about this Design Thinking model, I highly recommend taking Interaction Design Foundation’s Course “Design Thinking: The beginner’s guide”.
To speed things up, I’ll also be integrating elements from the Google Design Sprint, which is a 5-day process that enables rapid ideation and decision making. You can learn everything there is to know about design sprints by reading Jake Knapp’s book “Sprint”.
Timeline
The project will take up to 8 weeks, with a new post delivered each Friday. I know it seems a lot of time, but I‘ve only got a couple of hours in the evening available, and I’ve allocated enough to believe I can achieve my objective.
The scheduled lessons are:
12th April — Project Kick-off
19th April — Empathize Phase
26th April — Define Phase
3rd May — Ideate Phase
10th May — Prototype Phase
17th May — Test Phase
24th May — Iteration Session 1
31th May — Iteration Session 2
7th June — Conclusions
Next Step
Next Friday I‘ll present the first step of the Design Thinking process, the Empathize phase, where I’ll gather insight about the user and synthesize the information, in order to have a clear understanding of who I’m actually designing the app for.
I hope you enjoyed my first post. Till next time!
