Project One: Retrospective
Overall Thoughts on the Process
This first project was definitely challenging in a lot of ways for me. I know a pain point is that I want things to look good right away and I have a hard time putting in the research and background work before jumping straight into the design. The quote we heard this first week said by Abraham Lincoln, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe,” really resonated with me because I do need to spend more time “sharpening my axe” not just trying to chop down the tree in the first hour.
Beginning the Project
Initially, the broad subject of creating a health tracking app felt daunting. However, I really felt that after I started to meet with the users I interviewed and began to get their input on exercise, it was much clearer to see what kind of app I could make. One thing that really helped me with coming up with questions was looking back at the power points from Tuesday and coming up with things to ask based on each category from the lecture.
After I conducted the interviews with the users, I broke down our conversations into five categories. The categories were:
- Preferred types and times of exercise
- Mood before exercise
- Mood after exercise
- How working out with a partner feels
- Trouble with workout motivation
The stickies really helped to organize the interviews into more digestible pieces and helped me see what the users needed, not just what they wanted. The part that stood out the most to me was that people enjoy working out with someone else because it makes exercising more fun and feel less like a work out. That’s when I decided that it could be a cool idea to have an app that matches users up with other people around their city that enjoy the same types of exercise.
Initial Sketching
The app started as a series of sketches with a simple succession of screens that asked questions like how old the user is and what kind of exercise they like. In the first iteration of the app, I realized I didn’t have a back button in case the user decided to change their response to a previous question, so I added it to the original in the red pen.
Thoughts on Research
This was a point in the project where in retrospect, I would have gone back and done more interviews instead of just jumping into user testing with the app. The initial interviews were helpful in finding a direction I wanted to take but I needed to take it a step further and see what else users might want out of the app. This was also a point in the project where I wanted to cut straight to designing the app and “making it pretty” which I need to practice waiting to do until I can give the project some backbone with research. Overall, I think I just need to be more patient with my prep for a project and take my time at each phase of the project to spread out the effort evenly.