Change to meet your goals!

Giuliana Canale
3 min readOct 9, 2017

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This is about an assignment I had for my UX course where I had to research, find a need and develop a solution.

I started with defining a design brief, I chose Change;

Can technology help people and communities change their behavior to meet their goals?

From there the mission was to design an interface that facilitates personal or social behavior change. After this I had to dedicate time to some Observations in order to find the correct need and work on that. I suddenly realize one need that was part of my life and the people around me.

Every time me or any family member or friend tried to set time to make a reunion or an event it was hard to get everyone available the same day and time. So, I start to think in something that can help to improve this issue, specially for people that has so many events to organize on their day by day.

I notice everyone was trying to use different options to get to the same direction. Some people use their calendar, other people was using a physical agenda and other people just tried to memorize everything because they do not feel comfortable with any options to organize their events.

After the observations and research, I’d started the Ideation process where I had to describe the activity I observed, brainstorm and try to find different options that can be potentially helpful for the users. I’d listed Fifteen ideation quantity needs to help me get to the correct option. Beside this, I looked for samples related to the needs I found in order to inspire and understand what was working or not for the users.

Once I had an idea of the need and the possible solution I started to work on the storyboards and paper prototypes. This part of the process gave me a clear vision of where I was looking to get and some ideas that may not work for the users. I conducted multiple walkthroughs in order to find more pain points and issues that maybe my idea was missing.

Paper prototypes

After this process, I was able to find more needs and find different pain points I had on my prototype. Then, I moved forward to the wireframe design (low-fi design, not styling included yet) and implemented everything I was missing. I tested again and made a few iterations before I moved to the high-fi design where I implemented the styling to the design.

Moving forward I created a development plan (excel sheet) where I was able to organize my work week by week until the deadline. This was changing every week based on the new findings and feedback from users. It was extremely helpful to create this plan in order to complete the deadline.

Finally, I was able to create a prototype, in my case I used Marvel and with this ready I was able to move to an online A/B test and get more useful feedback from the users that I applied to the prototype after the final presentation.

Digital prototype with basic functionality

The final testing was well received by the users and I’m really excited to continue working on the development part and make this app happen. I have some more iterations I’ll need to work on and add important options based on the user’s request.

It was an interesting experience where I learned so many important aspects to take in count when you decide to propose a new idea to solve or facilitate any problem. For me the most important part to take in count from the beginning to the end is the user needs and feedback. They are the only ones who know the answer and can help you to build the perfect experience.

Check the prototype and test it! :) https://marvelapp.com/10649dcg

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