UX design; it’s not what I expected.
UX is more than you think, or more than I thought, anyway. My only experience with UX design was through viewing the wireframes put together by the UX designers at my office. I was not aware of all the multiple disciplines involved in the fascinating world of UX design.
Turns out, it’s a lovely mix of marketing, psychology, user-testing, statistical analysis and design. Oh my…some of my favorite things. Sign me up.
And, that I did. Sign-up that is. Since January of this year, I have been enrolled in the Coursera Specialization: Interaction Design, through UC San Diego.
It’s been a lot of work, but I’ve really enjoyed it. Now I am almost done, just finishing up my Capstone project, the very final assignment. It’s a good one: design an app, over a 10-week period, using one of 3 briefs. Those briefs being: 1.“Time: redesign the way experience or interact with time”; 2.“Change: design an interface that facilitates personal or social behavior change”; or 3.“Glance: Find people and design a personal dashboard tailored to their needs.”
The “Time” brief fascinated me, as it opened up such enormous possibilities. But then, those possibilities became daunting. How exactly does one change how people interact with time? Big challenge. I headed down the path of creating a time management app, and interviewed several coworkers around their use of time. But, I discovered 2 things; first, I am terrible at time-management, so how exactly was I going to give guidance on this topic? Second, there are already plenty of very good apps out their focused on time management. Next idea, please…
This roadblock was not a problem for long. As I went back and read through my interviews with my coworkers, I saw a trend. A lot of them expressed negative feelings about their job. Now, I know…it’s not a mind-blowing discovery to determine people aren’t always happy at work. But still, it was need, and one I wanted to serve.
What my coworkers seemed to need was a fresh or different perspective. Enter the idea of a gratitude journal. I personally use a gratitude journal and noticed a positive trend in my outlook after a period of time. And, given, we spend a large portion of our life at work, it seems only fitting that we try to improve our experience there, not just in our personal life.
Since there are several gratitude journal apps already out there, I know I would have to be different somehow. After speaking with a friend I realized receiving feedback from an app could be a very rewarding experience, (i.e. the Screen Time feature in iOS, or the anniversary/retrospective feature in Facebook). Everyone loves to find out more about themselves, after all.
In my own gratitude journaling experience I sometimes read old entries and try to find patterns of behavior. This enables me to catch myself in any negative or faulty thinking. This kind of analysis is what I decided to bring to my app. Through repeated journaling, the app user builds a personal data-set. Primarily, language use is reviewed, and patterns are found. The most common words used are listed and analyzed. This is the most important feature of the app, as it gives the user deeper insight into their attitude, and recommendations on how to improve their perspective.
Now, to build it. After the concepting effort was over, it was time to start the UX prototype. Since the feedback was so important to the success of the app, I wanted to make sure users understood that aspect of the app and could also easily navigate to that data.
On the home screen, I wrote a quick description of what the app offered. My first attempt, in the simple paper prototype, had too brief an explanation, and it’s doubtful users would have fully understood the app’s features. My final design provided a longer description, and also introduced the personality of the app through playful branding.
The next step was to make sure the user could easily navigate to the personal data screen. Throughout the UX design course, I’d been learning about various principles of UX design. One of the widely-used Nielsen Heuristics (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/) teaches that the user should have the freedom to navigate around the site as they choose. But this was balanced by advice from Professor Scott Klemmer, who taught that there were certain instances when you need to “funnel” the user to a specific area, to give them the best experience. This is the advice I took when I funneled the users to the statistics page. Right after journaling, a screen appears congratulating them and directing them to the personal data or “My Stats” screen.
An iOS tab bar was missing in early renditions. Adding this in later versions led to users being able easily navigate around the app. Specifically, I wanted to make sure users could access the “My Stats” area quickly. Prior to adding the bottom navigation users had to try to work through a 2-step process housed on one screen to view their data. This did not work well.
Early user testing also showed that the use of the term “Language analysis” was confusing. Updated this wording to “Language Pattern” and added descriptive copy below, as understanding this feature was not intuitive.
During online user testing, the many UX design iterations really paid off, and most users breezed through the app. There were some hiccups with 2 screens that visually looked similar, with the only difference being the copy. This and a lengthy account creation process were fixed.
I will say the early part of the Interaction Design Specialization was easier, when you simply had to critique existing websites, but when it came down designing your own app from scratch all sorts of questions arose. There were many ways to approach complicated UX flows, and at times it was overwhelming. But going back to Nielsen’s Heuristics; reviewing websites and apps that I admired for inspiration; and getting some good feedback from my classmates helped the process.
I am really happy I took Coursera’s Interaction Design Specialization and can’t recommend it highly enough. I’m glad UX Design was not quite what I expected…it was so much more.