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andy bunyan

Project 3: Contextual Interviews

The Meetup Website Development

Project 3 was a great opportunity to take my UX skills to the next level and consolidate what I’ve learned already, it was also the first time that I worked on a project as part of a team. My team colleagues and myself set about dividing the tasks between us and setting up a project management board on Trello (project management software). We adopted a Kanban style work flow, each of us taking one task at a time to completion before starting a new one.

The Brief:
1: Find and develop a solution for bringing Meetup groups and venues together so that they can easily find each other.
2: Allow venues, business’s and organisations to promote their spaces through the website to Meetup groups in order to develop new relationships and grow their networks.
3: To develop and embellish the existing Meetup site, adding several new features based on data from user interviews.
4: Create a screening form in order to recruit suitable candidates and conduct user interviews
5: Using data analysis techniques create and develop several persona’s to illustrate typical user journeys and how though design we can assist them.
6: Show how you created a prototype website to meet requirements of both the brief and the chosen persona.
7: Show the development process and how you used the research to influence the development of the website to wire frames.
8: In addition to meeting the requirements of the brief show you might add value by further and future development.

Case study:
Meetup is an online community that allows users to find and set up groups based on similar interests, these groups are usually hobbies and professional groups based around work. The brief asked us to develop a simple but effective way to bring groups and venue hosts together, something that is currently not possible to do on the Meetup site. The Meetup project was a perfect opportunity to use all of our UX techniques and principles we have learnt. We were able identify the key problems and opportunities and develop solutions for those issues to give the user a better more engaging experience. The brief asked us to develop additional features for Meetup that could be easily integrated into the existing site. We showed our development of the site with the use of a persona* and showed how they might go about using the new features on the Meetup website.
* A persona being a fictional typical user based on key behavioral traits defined by user research.

Approach:
Working in a team environment (Jack, Patric and Myself) we set about gathering as much data on current Meetup users and the issues they encountered. In addition to the problems/opportunities presented in the brief we were also keen to find out any other issues typical users might encounter. We also had to contact local businesses and organisations to find out how they promoted themselves. We had to develop the website from the perspective of both Meetup organisers and venues so they could find each other. We sent out a screening survey to find regular Meetup users, they were then invited in for interviews. We then conducted contextual interviews to find out how Meetup organisers used the website and find out any issues the encountered. The data gathered from interviews was used for both prototype development and creating the personas for the journey map. We invited members of the Meetup community to join our team for a design studio which a freethinking creative session to develop several design ideas without any constraints. We took any valuable insights gained from these sessions and combine with our research data we were able to build a very basic paper prototype. This was user tested and the feedback gathered allowed the team to make iterations and retest several times. We were able to develop two main prototypes, one for Group organisers and the other for venues, this gave us valuable insights into how both sides would go about finding each other. We developed two sets of hi fidelity wire frames which were used for our client presentation.

Concept mapping:

Although the brief outlined the problem / opportunity for us we were keen to identify any less obvious issues that users might encounter, which we could incorporate into our prototypes. Concept mapping is a great way to do this, we were able to find some additional areas for investigation.

Contextual Interviews and 1:1 interviews:

We needed to interview Meetup organisers in their natural environment to see how they interacted with the website to find any problems and issues they encountered. It was also important to interview venues and organisations to find out how they went about promoting their spaces.

Design Studio

We invited members of the Meetup to join us for a design studio, we looked at one aspect of the brief. The purpose of design studio is to brainstorm one aspect of the brief in order to explore all the concepts and ideas. We then go through a process of consolidation and refine our best ideas. We uncovered several good concepts to include in the final presentation. One idea was the inclusion of a random matching generator for venues and hosts, rather like a blind date.

Personas Development:

Using data from one to one interviews and subsequent feedback we are able to create several persona characters. These personas are fictitious characters who represent a group of typical users having similar behavioral traits and patterns. We use these to help develop user flows and user stories. A chosen persona is used to show how a typical user will interact with the website. We give them scenarios based on the way they typically behave. These scenarios will include tasks that have been designed for in the brief.

6: Experience map:

The experience map was created to show our typical users (Joan and Harry) might interact with the website at several points along her story path. For example in Joan’s story this would include her finding, contacting and booking a space for her Meetup group. For Harry’s story this will include finding Meetup groups and contacting them.

User flows:

The user flows were 4 typical scenarios that our personas Joan and Harry might most likely engage in. These scenarios help to define the use and functionally of the site. Both our personas should be able to complete several simple tasks easily and quickly.

Wire Frames:

Here we see a very early phase one sketch of what the website might look like and the other is the latest version of a wire frame which would be placed into Invision (prototyping software) and a very simple interactive prototype was produced with was used to conduct user testing.

User Testing:

User testing was conducted firstly using the paper prototype, the feedback we received was analysed and evaluated and then implemented into further iterations. User testing provided great feedback on both layout and usability, several key design changes were made. We went though several stages in our prototype development. Next we moved the prototype to simple block level wire frames using the application Sketch, these are a much higher quality and we are able to add interactivity. Finally we added pictures and colours to take the wire frames into high definition stage. Testing was conducted at each stage, suggestions and feedback were evaluated and changes made.

Outcome:

Contextual interviews provided very valuable data on users as well as allowing us as a team to develop a range of personas with which to test the task flows. It would have been impossible to develop a MVP (minimum viable product) without the use of personas or user interviews. This project was the first time I had worked as a UX team and it provided the perfect opportunity to develop those soft skills, like effective communicating, resolving team issues and working effectively as a group. At the high fidelity stage all users were able to complete tasks in a reasonable amount of time. Contextual interviews were great for providing the team with information and data on how users interact with the site. We were then able to address the issues that users had. The personas were invaluable for illustrating our user flows and showing how we as a team provided a better user experience for our Meetup users.

View the Prototypes here:

https://invis.io/M55PYRGEF