DL908: Fundamentals of User Experience Design
Paper Prototyping and Evaluation
Project Overview
The aim of this project was to design and evaluate a paper prototype for a shopping application that allowed users to see the carbon footprint associated with items they are purchasing and to monitor the carbon footprint of these purchases. With the ongoing climate crisis, people are becoming more conscious of the environmental impact of their shopping habits.
The Process
For this project, the five-stage Design Thinking framework developed by Stanford d. School was adopted (Raz, 2018). These five stages are Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test, which will be discussed in more detail.
1. Empathise
The first step of design thinking is empathising. According to Osman (2019), empathising can help designers to look deeper into situations and to think and create solutions for problems. The empathising stage consisted of user research to help understand the environment and the potential user.
Our user research consisted of the following:
· Heuristic Analysis
· Task Analysis
· Competitor Analysis
· Personas, Scenarios & Empathy Maps
Heuristic Analysis
Using the 10 Usability Heuristics designed by Nielsen (1994), an analysis of Capture, the carbon footprint tracker application was carried out. This analysis was chosen to find common usability issues to potentially resolve and improve user satisfaction and experience. The most noted heuristic on this application was the lack of error prevention. The full analysis can be found here.
Although Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics are widely used, it is important to note that heuristic evaluation does not replace usability testing, according to Panchaud (2021). Despite this, heuristic analysis is inexpensive and provides feedback quickly.
Task Analysis
According to Rosala (2020), a task analysis is the systematic study of how users complete tasks to achieve their goals. A task analysis was used to gain a deeper understanding of how users typically perform the task of purchasing items online, in this case, purchasing headphones from popular online retailer Wish.com.
Despite the clear benefits of conducting a task analysis, it is important to remember the limitations. There is a risk of the analysis being overly linear and oversimplified. As it is known with users, they can be unpredictable and we never really know how they might behave. This task analysis would be used later as the basis of the prototype flow.
Personas
In research from Salazar (2015) ‘personas are used to communicate information about users and create a common ground among different team members by unifying their views and understanding of target users.’
According to Adlin and Pruitt (2010), ‘roughly three to five personas are a good number to target’. Due to time constraints with this project, two personas were chosen. The group was unable to use real people, therefore proto personas were created. Laubheimer (2020), notes that a proto persona catalogues the team’s existing knowledge of who their users are and what they want.
It was decided that each member would create two personas, then as a group, choose which personas gave the best scope for features on the application. Tom was chosen as the primary persona as he embodied what the user research outlined about who the average online grocery shopper was. Another deciding factor for choosing Tom was the fact that his tech savvy skills along with his concern for the environment, allowed for more rich feature exploration. See Appendix A for Tom’s empathy map.
The secondary persona, Lucy, was a mix of two personas that had been created. Lucy represented the younger demographic and her love of cooking along with her motivation for measuring her carbon footprint against her friends, gave scope to implement gamification on the prototype, which will be discussed later.
Although personas have many advantages, such as empathy building and team alignment, Adlin and Pruitt (2010), note that one key disadvantage of personas is that they can be complicated to build accurately, without long term research, both qualitative and quantitative research. It can also be noted that sometimes it is not clear how to use personas or communicate them well.
All of the above user research helped the group gain a shared empathetic understanding of the problem the group was trying to solve.
2. Define
The define stage is important to know what problem you are going to solve for the user. Although the group held brainstorming sessions where individual research was discussed, it was decided that the application would be for online grocery shopping. The reason for this is the scope for a grocery shopping application seemed a lot bigger than the other proposed industries, for example fashion and electronics.
There was no clear problem statement from the group at this stage, which was an integral part to the project. For this reason, the prototyping stage become slightly disjointed at times over the course of the project. However, the team had completed extensive user research which was used.
3. Ideate
As stated by Norman (2013), when it comes to idea generation, two major rules should be followed. Those are ‘generate numerous ideas’ and ‘be creative without regard for constraints.’ Following on from the empathise stage, it was decided that a sustainability score would be given to each product on the application. This feature stemmed from the primary persona’s challenge of not knowing what foods can be improved on to lower their carbon footprint. The scores would then be colour coded, to indicate to users the level of sustainability and impact on the environment.
Following on from some initial user testing, the second iteration featured a star rating instead of a sustainability score. The qualitative data illustrated that the sustainability score wasn’t clear enough for the user to understand at a glance.
Next, we decided what features we wanted the app to have. As a group, we split this into 5 tasks that focus on encouraging the user to shop more sustainably.
4. Prototype
The home screen went through four iterations after numerous user testing sessions (see appendix B). The most notable change for us was the sustainability score changing from a number, to a star-based rating, then finally to a leaf, which was also implemented into the logo.
Eyal and Hoover (2014), found that more choices require the user to evaluate multiple options. Too many options or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or abandonment.
Another feature of the GreenGrocer prototype is the community and leader board section. Although there was a brief group discussion to create a nationwide leader board for the shopping app, research from Weinschenk (2020) indicates that people are more motivated to compete when there are fewer competitors. This is why we limited the leader board to friends only, to maintain the motivation to compete.
Full run through of prototype can be found here: https://youtu.be/iqyCZ20FygA
5. Test
In class, we conducted a user test with three participants. We asked participants to adopt the think aloud technique. Once the tasks were completed by the participants, questions were asked to to find out how they actually feel about using the product. A concern for us when doing user testing was the number of participants to use. Nielsen (2000), found that the best results come from testing no more than five users.
Some participants felt that the questions were too leading during the test. This stemmed from the group’s lack of experience with testing and varying scripts from each group member.
Reflection
On reflection, our initial communication for the project was good. We created a Miro project where we could see each other’s work. We also created a WhatsApp group where there was frequent communication. As the project progressed, the communication varied. A team of four was sometimes difficult to manage. Towards the end of the project, the communication improved.
The user testing stage proved most difficult for this project. The lack of organisation as a group was very evident during testing. Although the tasks were clearly set out, there was no script for the test. Everyone had their own questions to ask so there was a lack of cohesion when it came to the user testing stage.
The most important thing learned from this assignment was the process of paper prototyping. Prior to the project, I didn’t consider how useful paper prototyping could be. In research from Coleman and Goodwin (2017), some of the pros of paper prototyping are the ability to test ideas quickly, low cost, no tools or training required and no technical constraints.
Although these are great benefits of paper prototyping, the editing process can easily become frustrating. When making minor changes to the prototype, it didn’t take long for it to smudge and appear sloppy. This led to a lot of starting over and over again which was time consuming. Despite this issue, I believe the pros of paper prototyping definitely outweigh the cons and can see why it is used in real-life settings.
If we were to complete this project again, we would have focused more on the define stage to come up with a strong problem statement. We also would have chosen more contrasting personas. Although the prototype we designed catered to our primary and secondary persona, it may have been more interesting to choose a climate change sceptic or a much older, less tech-savvy user.
References
Raz, A. (2018, February 7). Get Started with Design Thinking. Stanford d.School. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/getting-started-with-design-thinking
Osman, M. (2019, March 20). Empathy in UX Design: What It Is and Why It’s Important. Medium. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://uxplanet.org/empathy-in-ux-design-what-it-is-and-why-its-important-3f6a8919ef10
Panchaud, K. (2021, July 3). Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics & their importance. Medium. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/jakobs-10-usability-heuristics-their-importance-6f0ddec8c938
Rosala, M. (2020, September 20). Task Analysis: Support Users in Achieving Their Goals. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/task-analysis/
Nielsen, J. (1994, April 24). 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/
Salazar, K. (2015, November 25). How Much Time Does It Take to Create Personas? Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona-budgets/
Adlin, T., & Pruitt, J. (2010). The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas. Elsevier Gezondheidszorg.
Laubheimer, P. (2020, June 21). 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona-types/
Norman, D. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised ed.). Basic Books.
Eyal, N., & Hoover, R. (2014). Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Illustrated ed.). Portfolio.
Weinschenk, S. (2020). 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) (2nd ed.). New Riders.
Coleman, B., & Goodwin, D. (2017). Designing UX: Prototyping: Because Modern Design is Never Static (1st ed.). SitePoint.
Lidwell, J. K. B. W. H., Universal Principles of Design. Universal Principles of Design. Rockport.
Sharp, H., Preece, J., & Rogers, Y. (2019). Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed.). Wiley.
Appendix
Appendix D: Miro Board
