It’s now Sunday and my UXDI classmates and I have officially wrapped up our first week of class, in addition to completing our first project to boot.
The first week of the course was nothing short of amazing. Meeting my instructional team and my classmates was half the fun and diving into UX made it even better. Our first day of class was a great introduction to UX and we spent the remaining 4 days creating an app from scratch. Here’s how it all went down.
Why is user research important? Because I am not the user.
My classmates and I were assigned one of three categories and told to just hop to it. My category was Health + Fitness and as a former athlete, I was pretty excited to get started. I spent many years in the pool and was excited to tackle a topic that I am passionate about. My brain usually jumps to a million and one different solutions in a matter of seconds, but UX has taught me to slow it down and ask questions before settling on a solution. So, before I let myself jump to conclusions about what kind of app to build, I kept a mental reminder that I am not my user and my own habits should not influence the design decisions regarding the app. It was hard! I enjoy working out and I daresay it’s even fun for me.
On Day 2, we buckled down and talked user research and why it is so important. It’ll save time, effort and money for the client if you find out early on exactly what your users want and how they’ll potentially be using the product. No one wants to launch a product that an entire team spends months on, only to find out that the users don’t know what to do with it, or that their needs were entirely different than expected. Key word here is expected.
With an open mind, I set out interviewing classmates with the goal of interviewing 3 folks in my class to get a good idea of a problem to solve for. As I was interviewing everyone, I realized how different each user was in their workout habits. Some used a fitness tracker app or a Fitbit, while one user had no interest in tracking his progress on such a granular level.
I interviewed 3 of my classmates and I found that I was almost positive about what the problem area would be, but knew that I would probably need to interview a 4th person to ensure that I wasn’t making assumptions about my users. After this last interview I felt confident that I understood what my users cared most about — they each wanted to work out with a family member or friend.
I dug into my notes from the interviews and set up an affinity map on Trello to really see what was important to my users. Overwhelmingly, they all agreed that they enjoy social workouts instead of working out alone.
Users expressed that they wanted to exercise with someone they knew in order to make working out more fun and to help hold them accountable.
Next up, I wrote out my problem statement and user goal to help me hone in and focus on my design decisions.
Problem statement: Users want to work out with a buddy, but do not always have a someone to work out with.
User goal: Help users find a buddy to work out with.
My immediate idea was to create an app linked to users’ social media accounts that would allow users to find a friend to work out with. I had some general ideas of how I wanted things to look and what user flow I wanted to show, but first, I’d need to start by putting my pen to some paper and sketching.
Sketching it out
Day 3 was all about putting the ideas in our heads onto paper. I started by drawing out a user flow on a whiteboard to get a sense of how many screens I’d need to draw and what I wanted on each screen. I’m partial to whiteboarding because I tend to get ideas while I sketch and build off of them. I’m halfway through a screen when I realize that I’ve already thought of a better, more intuitive way for the user to interact with that screen.
Above you can see my rough user flow. It helped me organize my thoughts and feel ready to start sketching. I decided that showing the user journey of creating an event would show how I’m helping my users achieve the user goal of finding a buddy to work out with.
I had a general idea of how most pages would look, but the home page was tricky for me. I probably drew 8–10 iterations of it and with the help of some of my peers, I finally settled on a home page that contained a newsfeed to see what other work out friends are doing (classes, pick up games, intramurals, etc) and three CTA at the top: create an event, search and user profile.
Here are a few of the early sketches I did on my home page to show my iteration process, from left to right.
After sketching a bit more, I transferred my sketches to paper and brought them in for our pin-up on Thursday to get some feedback from my peers.
The main piece of feedback I received was that the form screen for creating an event was a bit text heavy and overwhelming.
I decided to split the form aspect of creating an event onto 2 screens in order to make it more digestible for the user.
Prototyping + Usability Testing
After making a few edits to my screens, it was time to prototype. I uploaded my screens into POP, a prototyping app on iPhones. From there, I asked three of my peers to help me out with some usability testing. I set the stage by explaining that this user has already completed the onboarding process of the app by filling out preferences and profile settings, in addition to already having linked social media accounts.
You can view my prototype here.
Here are my findings from usability testing:
- 1 of 3 users wanted the form aspect to be on one screen, instead of 2 because it felt superfluous to have it on more than 1 screen
- 1 of 3 users would have preferred a progress bar to show how many steps were in the form so they could mentally track how much longer was needed to complete the task
- All 3 users experienced varying levels of difficulty when it came to inviting friends to an event. All 3 users opted to click the suggested friends and were not as interested in the Search function.
- All 3 users felt the app concept was simple and easy
- 1 of 3 users really enjoyed the confirmation page as it let the user know that the task is complete and what he could expect next
Next Steps
Iterate, iterate, iterate. Here are a few features and updates I’d like to make:
- Add progress bar to show how many steps there are to creating an event
- Simplify the invite friends feature
- Demonstrate how the app will learn from the user’s preferences: suggested friends based on personal preferences, suggested locations, etc
- Potentially add map feature for the Location section of the form
- Build out the search section
- Show the onboarding process and how a user will link social media accounts.
Wrapping it up
This was the quick and dirty version of how to run through the UX process and I loved every second of it. I’m excited to go through it again and again, and each time dig in a bit more to hone my skills. I learned a lot in just one week not just about UX, but also how to iterate on how I work. We’re at the tip of the iceberg and I feel ready to learn more from my instructors and my classmates.
