Non is the French’s favorite word: UX Case Study
The run has begun ! Our squad just started the 10 weeks bootcamp with Ironhack Paris. As you may have noticed in my previous stories I am starting an intensive learning with Ironhack to become a UX Designer. Once we setup the spirit, had some explanations, we quickly began serious things.
Pretty much every weeks are organized this way: You’re in a 4 days sprint with your teammates or solo, and you give a presentation to the lead teachers, coaches and rest of the squad on friday. You need to organize your time with efficiency, as it flies really fast !
First day, first project, first brief !
A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. (source : Wikipedia)
After our first lessons and introduction we had our first brief to solve a Wicked Problem. With my 1 week coworkers we chose to work on a migration problem. Our first task was to set up the range of our case, so we decided to design for Americans migrating to France. Once we focused on a precise scope we were able to begin the research.
Rule #1: You do not design for yourself
As learning designers working with Design Thinking and User Centric paradigms, we can’t just begin by getting on solutions and to rush on our computers. We have to find out what are User’s frustrations and needs in order to give the best answer. We started a research by interviewing Americans settled in France and sharing a survey to reveal trends.
The research is mandatory if you want to focus on a human centric solution. Basically, if you fail your research, you aren’t able to define the problem, which is the very next step once you gathered all the data and crunched it. But if you have a lot of informations, you can spot pain points, opportunities and frustrations, and start to find a pertinent problem to ideate on.
“Everything is slow and overly formal”
After asking 5 Americans in Paris and collecting responses at our survey, we used an Affinity Diagram and an Empathy Map (two UX tools we discovered and learned to use on our first week) to synthesize qualitative and quantitative stuff. This process gave us points to design for and the opportunity to create a persona :
Karen helps us to gather and to “humanize” the data. She helps us a lot to focus on who we are designing for. Then, with an ideation tool used in Design Thinking, “How might we?”, we defined a concrete problem to solve :
“How might we help Karen to seize a job opportunity by streamlining the process and access to information about her relocation to France?”
This statement may seem a bit long but it is the very ADN of our work. After stating the objectives, we ideated on everything we could do. Then we iterated on our ideas and voted to keep the best ones. We finally showed up with a concept that treats efficiently our wicked problem :
Feedbacks, feedbacks everywhere.
Above all, what we worked on is a dashboard concept that could be a support for a digital product or a feature. It is about on-boarding and fluidizing the process, giving feedbacks to the user at every steps and uniforming the whole experience.
The behind the scene part
We had an amazing time discovering each other. This is a lot different from school, as my cohort’s buddies come from every fields and jobs. Time rushes as we only work one week and apart our lessons. This exercise was focused on the first steps of the Design Thinking process, that are in our case the UX field, and we understood a lot more by practicing it. We learn a lot each day and this is an amazing feeling to be together into this.
Team credits : Emmanuelle Pichon Ella Forté Cloé Campellone and Baptiste Millet
