IxD online course
What have you been up to for the last couple of weeks? I’ve been wrapped up completing my Interaction Design (IxD) Specialization Capstone Project.
The whole course has taken a couple of months in-between work and life commitments. Taking my sketchbooks and sharpies on holiday with me and carting my laptop around to make use of spare hours commuting. All this work has resulted in a project and an idea I am really proud of. (And a neat little certificate I can pop on my LinkedIn profile).
Understand (Empathise and Define)
There were 3 wide-reaching briefs to choose from. I chose ‘Glance’:
“We are surrounded by information. Some might even call it overload. How might technology show us the essential pieces at a glance, so we can quickly navigate through the noise to get to what we really want?”
My mission :
“Find people and design a personal dashboard tailored to their needs.”
You will see how this mission was shaped and changed by the observation and research I carried out.
I settled on a simple question “How do people stay ‘up to date’?” Our first task was to observe and interview. So I emailed and text friends and family and got on with it! I have to say, you can feel a little silly typing up notes, asking ‘and what are you doing now’ while someone scrolls through their phone.
But it was worth it, I made an interesting observation! Success! 🙌
But it was worth it, I made an interesting observation! Success! 🙌 Every person I observed and interviewed expressed some kind of concern about bias or the credibility of the information they were consuming. However, no one did much about it.
Explore (Ideation and Prototype)
We were encouraged to ideate as much as possible, make lists, brainstorm, come up with the ridiculous and then filter down. Not to be too device specific. Until we could distill our idea into a point of view:
“With news and content being served and filtered through so many different sources, how can we be sure what is opinion, what is fact or what is ‘fake’ without conducting time-consuming research or having sub-par experience?”
How on earth can I make this a dashboard?! 🤦♀️ I felt stuck, I hit a wall. That ‘success’ feeling had gone.
How on earth can I make this a dashboard?! 🤦♀ ️I felt stuck, I hit a wall. That ‘success’ feeling had gone. I’ve worked as a visual/ UI designer for a number of years and have hit this wall a lot, but when you work in a team you can bounce ideas off each other and have conversations. This is hard when you’re a one-man band.
So I went back to the brief and thought about what I could produce if this idea wasn’t limited to a dashboard. The task required two storyboards and two paper prototypes based around your point of view.
Storyboards helped me to get over the wall and think about the thoughts, feelings and context of the user. Where would they use this? How much time would they really spend looking at this app? These questions became fleshed out in the storyboards which in turn helped to shape the paper prototypes. The system works!
There were two ideas. One was ‘Can you spot fake news?’ which was more game-like and the second was ‘Do you live in an echo chamber?’ which was based around the dashboard.
Materialise (Testing and Implementation)
Now for the fun part, testing the ideas. The process lasted a good few weeks and each time the solution became better. Kinks were smoothed out, needless parts (even parts I liked) were removed or improved and the paper prototype became digital.
Other IxD online students and volunteers from my trusty pool of colleagues, friends and family were my willing subjects…most of the time. We were tasked with three methods of testing:
- Heuristic evaluation of the paper prototypes. This was done online with other IxD online students and by myself after observing someone using the paper prototypes.
- After transferring from paper to digital we then ran some in-person user testing on a device. Again, I roped in some lovely testers from work. This is where it got really interesting and I started to really iterate the design.
- A/B testing online, where we received videos from four users, two had tested one version, two had tested another.
This was super interesting for me being British, the news articles I chose for the digital prototype were international. Most Brits know a bit about what’s going on around the world. These online testers were based in the US and a lot of the international news threw up a lot of unknowns for them.
Through testing one idea became the clear winner and by using an iterative design process the idea flourished.
Through testing, one idea became the clear winner and by using an iterative design process the idea flourished. It was the first idea ‘Can you spot fake news?’. A game-like interaction where users read headlines and guess ‘fact or fake’. Users understood the controls straight away, it was simple (read: fewer screens to design) and even seemed kind of fun. Through the user testing process users enjoyed guessing ‘fact or fake’ and really engaged with the content.
An app is born!
After many iterations Fact or Fake was born. A game where users read the trending headlines and guessed; fact or fake. Users don’t have to spend time ‘researching’ if what they see in the news or on social media is credible. Hopefully, this game can start to develop some critical thinking and highlight popular stories that may have been warped or are simply untrue.
Once ‘Fact’ or ‘Fake’ is tapped the user is served a ‘Correct!’ or ‘wrong!’ screen and a small explainer about the headline origins. They have the opportunity to keep guessing or find out more. During user testing users enjoyed the game aspect, felt as if they learned something and wanted to play again!
Time for a polish, which my inner design geek 🤓 loved, I was finally allowed to tweak all those details and get a colour palette working.
I learned that…
Paper prototypes are invaluable.
As a visual and UI designer it’s incredibly hard to make a ‘simple’ prototype when you *know* it could look much better. You lose focus on the users and start thinking about the design. This is one reason I found paper prototypes so useful, there was no temptation to needlessly tweak colours, typography, pixels etc.
The work is never done.
There are so many more opportunities I would love to explore. One, in particular, was around the nuances within ‘fact or fake’. Many headlines have been completely sensationalised, and while they are technically true, the sentiment behind them becomes totally twisted. It was hard to integrate this idea into the app without losing the fun and simple aspect of the game which users enjoyed.
