Go to the profile of Faith J. Shin
Faith J. Shin

Intro to UX — Connected-Home

UXDI P1

How do you design a mobile app that all users love? The first thing I learned is to get to know the users. I found myself generating ideas of what I thought would be a great app that users would love the night I was given a project topic. Thankfully it didn’t take long for me to scratch every idea and start right when I was informed about user research and synthesizing.

Ideas, from designing interface to content, come from the user research and analyzing it. The problem that needs to be solved, also, comes from the user research and analyzing it. This is all because I, as a UX designer, am not the user.

These are the steps I followed to create my first project, Connected-Home.

1. User Research

2. Synthesize

3. Analyze

4. Sketching — Prototype

5. User Testing — Iterate

User Research

I used Topic Map and Interview to get to know my users. I created a topic map and then prepared some carefully-thought questions to ask my users.

Questions I asked my users are:
1. What type of “Smart”/electronic devices do you have at home?

2. What are the top/low 3 features about it?

3. Describe how you spend your time at home.

Interviewing user

The 3 main findings were:

1. Have bluetooth speakers at home

  • Whether the speaker was small or big, cheap or expensive, they had a bluetooth speakers at home.
     
    2. Bluetooth connection is complicated
  • Users had presumption that connecting would go through complicated steps and that it’d be slow.

3. Listen to music at home

  • When users are at home, they spend their time listening to music or just having music in the background.

Synthesize & Analyze

With the user research data, I moved forward to synthesizing and analyzing the data. I used affinity diagram to identify the insights.

creating affinity diagram (left) identifying the insights (right)

Through the affinity diagram, I was able to identify insights.

1. I am connected daily.

2. I don’t want to go out of my way to connect. (Users had a presumption that connecting process is annoying and complicated.)

Sketching & Prototype

I used Pens and Paper to sketch and create a prototype. I started off my sketching with a design direction in mind.

  • A speaker app that connects your device to the speaker.
  • Easy, simple
  • More automatic/less manual process

With the very first sketching, I put it in a prototype app Marvel for user testing. I asked my users to test it with carefully-thought questions and recorded by writing their responses on my laptop.

Nick using my prototype for the user testing

The power of user testing was amazing! There was an instant realization for an iteration on certain pages and it was interesting to witness all 3 users reacts the same or very similar on certain pages.

All 3 users:

  • understood what they were looking at on Screen 1
  • experienced confusion on Screen 2
  • were happy (that they were connected fast) on Screen 3
  • wanted “My Device” to be clickable on Screen 4

With the results of my user testing and my own intuition, I noticed that Screen 2 & 4 needed an iteration. After the iteration, I executed user testing again and was able to witness positive reactions from my users.

Final Prototype: https://marvelapp.com/1533990

1st Prototype: https://marvelapp.com/7ad95g6

P1 Docs and Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EduTnTmdIyVnOb7mwsKFV39MG4cAAC7dBoZCimcipBg/edit?usp=sharing