Interaction Design project: FamView App
The Beginning: on MOOCs and Parenting
After becoming interested in UX and design thinking, I enrolled in the Interaction Design specialization through Coursera and UCSD. MOOC platforms like Coursera are ideal for working parents who need “extreme” flexibility to fit in continuing education (in my case, the schedule reality of work and 3 young daughters). This specialization included a series of online classes followed by an experiential final project: ideating, designing, prototyping and testing an app.
Since becoming a parent, I am continually amazed by how rewarding, yet challenging, it is. When coming up with ideas for the final project, I decided to focus on a personal problem. Coming home from a world of powerpoint and politics to three vivacious preschool girls is… wonderful but chaotic, affirming but stressful, and always very, very busy.
What is FamView?
The goal of the FamView app is to ease the transition home for working parents by giving them important information at a glance. To add to my extensive domain expertise (that is, arriving home to chaos), I conducted interviews with other parents who work outside the home. The main information needs of these parents were: 1) general understanding of family members’ emotional states and how their days went and 2) status information so they know where they can “jump in and help out”. I also learned that while my focus had been on my young and highly volatile children, assessing the emotional needs of a spouse who is at home is equally important.
Following the interviews, I began storyboarding options to clarify the use case for the app. (If nothing else, this specialization cured me of my pathological fear of drawing through the revelation of 5-point “star people”). Two alternate storyboards, one with a primary focus on task, and another with a primary focus on emotion, are below:
Rock, Scissors….Paper Prototype
After refining the information needs, it was time to start prototyping. This begins with paper prototypes, which has the advantage of being able to manually move around navigation bars and individual icons between screens. Experimenting with flow, location, and content of navigation was invaluable in designing the app. Below is the version of the app at this stage, which includes several features that were removed in the final version:
1,001 Ways to Use Powerpoint
Following user testing with the paper prototype, it was time to take this show online! After some initial angst about how to create a decent-looking app with no graphic design background, I landed on using powerpoint to create the screens. After all, if there is one thing I can do after 13 years in corporate….it’s powerpoint! From ppt, the individual screens could be exported as jpgs to build the prototype in InVision. InVision is a great visual prototyping tool with particular strength in ease of collaboration and sharing in the mobile form factor (prototype can be easily ported to your phone for testing). Below is an early version of the main page and a few additional screens:
The prototype then went through several rounds of testing, first with friends/family, then with other classmates, and finally with “semi-professional” paid testers on UserTesting.com as a low-fidelity A/B Test. Through UCSD, we were able to get 4 testers on UserTesting for free. Being able to examine videos and commentary from those testers within an hour of posting the prototypes to their site was surreal!
Through user input on the app, I was able to evolve both the design and content. These changes included: focusing more information on the main screens (vs. a click away), making it easier to scroll between family members, elevating a prompt to update one’s own information, adding a location map, and including an activity stream.
In doing so, I also streamlined and focused the app by removing features which were more focused more tasks or the house itself vs. the family. This was often noted by participants as lower priority, and presuming lack of “internet of things”-like integration with appliances, was just not core to the app’s function of connecting and enabling the working parent. The main limitation of the prototype is that InVision supports linking pages, but not true interactivity (such as selecting an option from a drop-down).
Making Prototypes Great Again
Below is the final version of the prototype’s main page and a few others:
In addition to building the prototype, the final project also required a Medium article (words and images, check and check!) and a YouTube video (uh oh.) Fortunately, I discovered a cartoon video creation product called powtoon that is only a shade more difficult to use than powerpoint (yes, that again — did I mention I work in corporate?)
While it was a culture shock to revert back to weekly homework/tests in completing the classes for this specialization, I loved the opportunity to learn new skills and exercise creative control. As a novice, I’m very happy with how the final project turned out, and look forward to experimenting with more interactive products in the future!
Prototype Link (“view in browser” for iOS): https://invis.io/5V84NHV6X
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uYgLEuJP4c&rel=0
