Flying solo. Individual UX/UI Project Part 1 (UX)
So.. the time to do our first solo project at ironhack arrived.
The project was about executing a full UX design process while
applying fundamental UX skills. After only 4 days we needed to present our low fi prototype, testing results, next steps, and explain how we got there.
Our “client”, the National Wellness Institute wanted us to reimagine how people can adopt and maintain a routine that enhances their wellbeing. The tool we were to create could be focused in any category that relates to personal wellbeing.
First things first. I started thinking of ideas or categories on which I could base the app. My idea was to build an app on a subject I knew, felt a connection with, and taking into account that this is a “school project” and we had only 4 days to do it, an app directed to a target I could easily find and interview.
Lately I’ve been really aware of what I eat and when I eat, and I’m all about healthy habits instead of diets, so this subject felt right to me. Eating Habits, because what we eat is a big part of overall wellness.
Research was the first step. First I looked around to see if there were any other apps doing something related to my idea and then I did a competitor analysis. After that step, I started coming up with questions for the interviews, first an “umbrella question” which basically means an open ended question to make the interviewee open up and talk about their experiences, and a set of specific questions from which the answers I hoped to get from the conversation.
After conducting a couple of interviews I created a Lean Survey Canvas to help me define the questions that would be part of the survey I was sending out.
4 interviews and over a 100 responses from the survey later, I started gathering all the data and synthesising it. I built an affinity diagram, a tool that gathers ideas, opinions, keywords, etc, and organises them into groupings based on their pattern or relation.
This helped pin point my problem statement and come up with the user persona.
Problem Statement:
Professionals who want to improve their eating habits need to be aware and organised about their meals because they lack the time to plan and prepare ahead of time.
After this, everything became about helping this person, Elisa, solve her problem with her eating habits. She would like to prepare her meals in advance and don’t spend so many hours without eating.
Last step before the brainstorming and sketching began, was to create Elisa’s Journey to illustrate her main pain points on what a common Monday for her would look like.
So finally… the brainstorming begin. I took a few minutes to just come up with ideas, as crazy as they seemed, this was just about letting my mind go wild and think of features that could help make Elisa’s life and eating habits better. This features were later organised by how valuable they would be for Elisa, and how complex it would be to implement. And as we had a short time to create the prototype I picked just a few of the most valuable and least complex ones to develop.
The solution will include reminders, recipes for healthier versions of meals, automatic grocery lists and suggested whole meals and menus. The App would basically do all the thinking for her to do a Meal Prep leaving her with the only tasks of shopping and cooking.
Testing time. I sketched my screens and created a low fi paper prototype to start my user testing.
After a few tests, I got some really interesting feedback and went to make some changes which I implemented straight on a mid-fi prototype, which I of course tested again. Some changes for example were replacing the first version of the home screen that worked as a navigation to an inspirational and new content feed. Also, rearranging the steps for creating a meal prep menu, converting pop ups into full screens and even deleting screens and removing steps. Lots of iterating on this project.
Finally I felt totally satisfied with the prototype and the user found it intuitive and easy to use so it was time to show it to the world (or well, the ironhackers)
Click here to go to the prototype. Not all the features are developed so some blue hints will appear on the screen to show where you should click. The flow will be that of setting up the profile, starting with the food preferences, schedule and reminders, and then going straight to the meal prep feature.
Thank you for checking out my project!
Take a look at the Part 2 (UI) of this project and final prototype
