“ballpoint pen on white notebook” by Minim Design Co on Unsplash

To be a user experience designer is to be a mix of graphic designer, social psychologist, programmer, and skilled interviewer.

Recently, I took a Udacity course taught by Don Norman on design elements and principles. I wanted to put what I learned from UX articles and podcasts to the test, while also gaining experience in the design process. The course was easy to follow and touched on a lot of the topics I’ve read in Don Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things. Documenting my experience working on the final project served as a way to improve my writing, and to give a holistic review over what I’d learned so far.

The Project:

My final project was to create a mobile time bank UI. A time bank is a system for people to exchange their time for services. For the project, all time was equal. No one’s hour valued more than anyone else's.

After reading over the project guidelines, my initial goal was to design a landing page for the time bank. It would display how much time a user had in their bank and the two possible actions they could take: requesting time or offering time.

First, I considered the best way to design the time bank itself. An hourglass was the first thing that came to mind. It’s an image most people are familiar with and could represent the amount of time a user gained as a pile of sand at the bottom of the glass. Through a few sketches, I found the hourglass analogy didn’t work well when a user loses time when a service was completed.

I also considered a modern wall clock with its hands moving to show the change in a user’s time balance at the end of each transaction. I later rejected it for a digital clock.

Initial sketches for the time bank’s home page.

The next step was to design a discover feature. The feature had to provide two things:

• Show other people within a user-specified radius.
• Show important information about other users, such as name, and distance away from the current user.

Once these two features were established, I worked on implementing other goals I had for this part in the user journey. Similar to ride-sharing apps like Uber, I wanted to show a city grid underneath user avatars to orient the viewer. I also listed the names of local business to help user conversations about places to meet up.

Research:

With a finished paper prototype in hand, I interviewed a three of my friends. I documented their experiences as they interacted with the prototype. They seemed to understand the initial concept but stumbled through the process of requesting time.

Issues included:

• Unclear place to input the amount of time.
• Unnecessary search parameters.
• Unclear copywriting.

Paper prototype I used during user testing.

In the first prototype, I tried to simplify the search box by offering the same parameters when a user wanted to request or offer time. In user testing, I learned the “all-in-one” parameter system confused testers and didn’t work how I intended. In the redesign phase, I created two separate search screens for requesting and offering time.

With the search menus redesigned, I reorganized and slimmed down any other screens that had extraneous information. I tweaked the “List View” option for the results page, removing some of the information displayed there, as well as removing it from the “Map View” screen as well.

Last, I separated the “offer time” user map from the “request time” user map, redesigning them to better suit their unique purposes.

The Final Product:

Final lo-fi sketches before I made the clickable wireframe

The finished result was a clickable wireframe I created using Marvel. I focused on the “Request time” track because it underwent the most change.

I decided to name the product “PocketWatch”. The name continues the clock analogy and would lend itself to clever branding if it were to be developed into an actual mobile application

What I’ve Learned:

• To be a user experience designer is to be a mix of graphic designer, social psychologist, programmer, and skilled interviewer. I had to consider not only how the elements looked on the page, but also how users would interact with them, and their function within the established IOS/Android framework.
• Design is hard, but it's satisfying to step back and appreciate a finished product. It feels similar to holding the final draft of a fiction piece.

Future Steps:

Project Specific:

• Trim down and simplify the process of requesting time from someone
• Explore possible safety features for the app

Personal:

• Pursue other opportunities to refine my knowledge of the design method
• Learn some industry standard programs like Adobe XD to create hi-fi wireframes. If you have any suggestions, please leave them down below!

Leave any feedback below! Thanks for reading!