Project Nessa: a Dance-card app I.

— a self-indulgent blog about an ongoing work

I want to document the process of my (quasi-)first UX project.

Everyone have to start it somewhere, so I start it with this sentence. Of course, as the word in the brackets suggests, I have tried a couple of times before, but never wrote down the process — only a couple of sketches, half-finished wireframes and dozens of notes in various notebooks remained. This time it will be different! Really.— said a sad, sarcastic voice in my head while listening to the pouring rain otuside, but nonetheless, I managed to start it.

As several articles, books, teachers had stated, the”design project” starts with research. After stating the obvious thing, writing down what are we to accomplish, and so…

Let’s start again. At the beginning. There was a sentence:

We want to (re)design a dance-card application.

It was made for our community which likes very much to make (fantasy themed) balls and thus pretend to be grown ups. Of course we are in the 21th century, so it has to be manageable through social media (facebook, what else). And preferably with a cellphone.

A few programmer geeks got together, and made it, and we used it, and were almost happy, but life and technology doesn’t stop, so after several facebook API changes emerged a new need for a new and revamped dance-card app. The original developers collected a front-end developer, a tester and me as an UX designer.

We decided to make the “already done” part useful and working as the first step, then gradually incorporate some new and very much needed features.

What works?

• We can log in with facebook.
• Manually the developers can upload a set-list with youtube links.
• The users can ask others to dance for a specific song (already in the setlist)
• The app reminds them to tell them if these people hasn’t rsvp-d to the specific event yet
• A notification appears when someone is asked to dance
• We can either accept or ignore the asks
• After confirming the dance it appears in our dance-card.
• There is a button to print out the dance-card — the design for it has to be hacked in manually (by the developers)

After collecting these, I put them apart and started from the beginning — what should a dance-card app do?

What is the problem that it solves?

So I produced these… very… compelling little doodles, then came up with these two solutions:

• Managing dance partners
• Looking up the next partners during dance

So, for the commencing user research part I have the main questions:

• How do you collect dance-partners for a set of dances?
• How do you know when to dance with whom?
• … and how did you like the dance-card app?

In the next part I will present the user research (mainly interviews, old app tests and a questionnaire).