Case Study: Introducing UX Methodologies to a Consumer Tech Company's startup project and enhancing user interface during design process.

Overview: The product was a personalized chrome extension where users get to choose their topics of pictures to be displayed along with daily quotes to enhance focus and motivation.

I joined the company as a Content Intern, my job was to collect photos for the chrome extension and ehance their quality. Throughout my work I have seen the need to integrate UX methodologies in the design process because it can simply create an easy extension that people would need and use.

At the time my experience in UX was limited to courses I have been taking and tons of research equipped with a drive to look at the world from the users' perspective and meet their needs.

I couldn't just ignore the fact that UX would actually save us so much time. So, I pitched the idea to my employer and he was thrilled to get on board.

I took responsibility of the UX Research part of the project and began.

Collaboration with stakeholders:

-I suggested we use Notion as a software to facilitate the process of research and design in the work place and track progress. Notion is a new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It's the all-in-one workspace for you and your team.

-Presentation updates on weekly meetings.

Stage 1 : Identifying the problem statement.

At this stage we were designing a chrome extension that displays customized photos and quotes with no idea of what the user might think or actually needs.

So, we needed to know what would make someone use our chrome extension rather than simply use any other extension. What is our added value?

Stage 2: Benchmarking and data collection

I started with market analysis to study what worked for the most popular personalized extensions,why and what are the common user genres present in order to have an overview on what extensions provide and what makes users use them.

Key Findings:

> Personalized extensions focus on maximizing customization in features.
> Adding customizable tools for efficiency adds value to the extension.

However, there was another issue at stake which was the performance of this extension.

According to DeBugBear’s study "reviewing the impact of the 1000 most popular Chrome extensions on browser performance and end-user experience. Some extensions may delay the page loading time by up to 4 seconds. Others shorten battery life by causing more than 20 seconds of CPU activity on page load."

So according to the market, we need a customizable extension with efficiency tools and relatively good performance.

But what do users need?

If personalized extensions focus on customization and efficiency so a flexible user interface is essential to all similar extensions but what would drive users to ours?

💡I had an IDEA which was inspired by Google’s Next Billion Users initiative which is to build for everyone, everywhere. In that way we would be able to reach a broader user range and make user experience much easier for already present users. Our added value is THE USER.

Our focus: Cost, Connectivity and Literacy.

The extension was to be for free to drive users so there is no cost.

We collected a common wireframe and UI elements and provided it to the design team for development before the exploration research phase.

Features added: World clock, local weather forecast, to do list, alarm feature, voice assistant.

Research phase 1: Participatory design research

So I decided to undergo participatory design research for people who are not tech users to get high quality insights.

1-Recruitment process:

The project was on a low budget and couldn't afford recruiting participants and we were in the COVID pandemic.

I thought it was the perfect time because people that are not familiar with tech are now switching to tech for learning or work purposes.
I contacted several student council presidents at local schools and universities in my network in addition to several HRs at local companies that switched to remote work for volunteers to our research.

The approach was through email and Whatsapp groups with a simple message indicating the aim of the research, introducing the product and needed requirements for participants.

2- Participatory design research key findings:

>> Poor typography in design.
>> Placement of certain widgets.
>> Missing cross compatibility toggles for other apps or websites.
>>View browsing history.

3- Design Psychology and Eye tracking research

I researched about how designs work and how do users interact and navigate through different user interfaces of little context webpages such as our extension.

Suggestions:
- Placing most important widgets for efficiency and customization in the Z Shape Pattern.
- Placement of voice assistant to the right side.
- Using user friendly typography that is clean and minimal.
- Changing icons to relevant semiotic signs and symbols.

Research phase 2: Usability studies

After implementing the design changes, we moved on to remote and non-remote moderated usability studies.

1- Recruitment:
For this phase we had interviewed 5 participants since we "needed to discover issues in the interface."

2- Preparation:

-Schedule meetings and find best testing platform for remote testing, we used Zoom for ecause it's common and easy to use.
-Setting up tasks.
-Getting equipped with awareness for biases that might take place.

3-Conducting studies.

4- Gathering data:

-Aggregated empathy maps.

Pain point identification: Slow performance and not easy to understand.

5- Suggestions :

Suggestions were based on research and DeBugBears study on extensions' performance.

The pictures displayed were enhanced which helped in decreasing the performance.

- Replace enhanced pictures with better quality pictures taken by photographers and featuring them in that way we would enhance the quality of the displayed pictures without slowing the performance and involve users in the design where they can share their own photographs.

- Adding "privacy tools" to enhance performance. >> (Connectivity)

Research phase 3: Assesing UI enhanced impact (Literacy) on user experience (A/B testing)

- Recruitment process :

5 volunteer participants from the group of volunteers in the initial exploration phase that didn't take part in the study.

-Preparation.
-Conducting testing.

-Key findings:

>>Relatively faster performance.
>>Accessible and usable design.

Thank you so much for reading. Please don’t hesitate to contact me for any questions.