TODO - If Marie Kondo designed an app this would be it!

Concept Project | Mobile App | UX Case Study

Margarida Jesus
Nov 6 · 6 min read

Summary

Individual Project — Develop an interactive prototype of a mobile application.

This was the first project part of the GA immersive course in London I attended from July to October 2019.

Brief

  • Select a partner to interview about their needs & desires around a theme.
  • Identify a problem that could be solved with the design of a simple mobile app.
  • Working with your partner, design an app for each other to solve the problem simply and effectively.

Method & Tools

  • Double Diamond Process during 1 week sprint
  • Pen & Paper
  • User Research
  • Interactive clickable prototype.
  • Experience map and User flows.

Project Overview

1 - The Problem

We all have too much going on and we don’t need another To Do tool to add to the clutter!

Having been matched with Rhiannon as my partner for the first project of my UX Design Immersive course at General Assembly, I had to get to know more about her and about her daily life including the things that make her happy and also the ones that get her frustrated.

Our conversation turned out to be more about frustrations than happiness as with a life full of commitments on personal and professional levels she often gets stuck with the same problem:

Interview with the User

2 - The Plan

After the project has finished, it does sound a very clear problem to solve but it wasn’t that way from the beginning. Within a very short time we were informed about our 1st UX concept project which had, as the overall goal, creating a mobile app for one of our colleagues that was going to be assigned to each of us randomly.

Being a 1 week sprint, I had to quickly draft some questions in order to prepare for the user interview. As the brief was quite general and with no main requirements and considerations the project was quite challenging. I put together questions with similar subjects and based on similar themes — organisation and daily life. The issue this caused was that it didn’t leave space for other topics of discussion and made my approach somewhat biased.

Nevertheless things didn’t actually go as expected as during the interview most questions weren’t asked and new topics came up.

3 - Discovering

After the initial interview and analysis of all the information I understood that, as per my earlier assumptions, there were many frustrations on Rhiannon’s daily life organization. Although I had found the main cause of frustration of the user, I needed to know more about her behaviour and habits. I put together another list of questions for a second user interview but this time the questions were more objective and (this time) I consciously made sure I allowed space for the conversation to flow as I was still open for the subject of work to be changed.

The outcome of the interview confirmed my assumption and also gave me much food for thought! To analyse further the information gathered from the two interviews I decided to create an affinity mapping and list all the content gathered and grouping it by subjects.

Affinity Mapping

4 - Defining

Laying out and grouping information made me more aware of Rhiannon’s pain points and, with the aim to make clear to myself what was the situation, problem, solution and outcome, before taking any further steps, I sketched a storyboard of Rhiannon’s ideal path.

Also, supported by the market research done on the discovery phase, I put together a list of main considerations/ goals I would be considering when designing the app:

  • If the problem is information clutter and access, decluttering the layout will be the primary goal — Marie Kondo was an inspiration on the UX and UI Design Phases.
  • As using time wisely is one of the main user goals, being able to log information quickly and with the less steps possible was going to be one of the main challenges to overcome.
  • Being able to save, set up a reminder and create lists would be integrated on the MVP but would be conditioned by the goals set up above.
  • Most to do tools have their look and functionality inspiration on actual notebooks which makes them seem quite dated and I wanted to divert from this.

An Experience Mapping was developed in order to understand the steps the user would take on an happy journey and this has contributed to identify the different wireframes actions.

Experience Mapping

5 - Designing

Being my first UX project, and although I’m used to draw, for some reason I was reluctant to try pen and paper straight away. Therefore I did my first wireframes initially using Sketch. I clearly knew the steps I was following but the fact is that in terms of composition was far from the goals I was aiming for I understood I had to spend more time developing my ideas.

1st Wireflow Developed

After this, I did have a go at my first pen and paper wireframes and I realised that sketching does give more freedom and helps to try quickly different ideas. I put together the first paper prototype and moved on into user testing.

Paper Prototype and User Testing

I was very confident about my solution on the paper prototype and this allowed me to have the first learning realisation which was:

For instance the purpose of the time and date setup was unclear to some users . Also, part of my learning curve was that it’s very important to give the right task for the users to test, as I gave a task where the app had been used before and it did created some confusion during the testing process.

6 - Delivery

As a first concept project the aim was to achieve a paper prototype by the end of the week. Later on the GA course we had another week to develop the UI only of the same project so I am showing below a sneak peak but the development of the second process will be presented as a separated case study.

Mid and Hi-Fi Prototypes

At the end of the project and with regards to next steps, they would be :

  • Develop the Mid and Hi Fidelity Prototypes
  • Further User Testing
  • Develop a brand

7 - Looking Back

The excitement took over in this first project but certainly many pre conceptions were overturned with new learnings. I have worked in many projects with tight deadlines in my previous career, but having a 1 week sprint to come up and develop an idea including user testing/ feedback during the process was certainly a first.

Understanding that there isn’t much time to develop a project on the conceptual side and trying to focus more on doing instead of thinking while using the best tools to facilitate the process, was a very big challenge for me. Realising that the constant iterative process is so valuable in order to ensure it will be a successful product was one of the highlights of my learnings du this project.

This project definitely made me excited to keep building my path to be a UX Designer but also made me put my feet on the ground in the relation to the scope of the learning process.

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