First Case
It started when I asked about a regular day at the office, at home, on the road, and with the family in Vancouver. Basicly all things considered.
The Opportunity
I correlated problems by looking at all the interview questions asked, from saving time, video regulation, and family management. Solving this for Sviatlana Shauchenka, a mother with a family.
At first it was not easy and I had to be patient to ask alot of non-directional questions. After doing the first interview it came down to funneling all these problems down into what she wanted. However what she wanted was alot so it was difficult to form a usable design without having an epic aneurism. Therefore it came down to what she needed rather than what she wanted.
The direction of the project is self initiated and the problem directive was not straight forward. So I attempted to create a venn diagram with what Sviatlana cared about, and with what I cared about. I think a backing for strong motivational it must be important with all stakeholders.
Research
User questioning were the main method of approach to usability. I tried to have all questions to revolve about what her network meant. There wasn’t a single method that I used in discovery. At some point I looked for characteristics in her linkedin profile. Then it was further questioning about family. All efforts in the end just made sense when everything was in front of me.
Conclusions came down to connivence, family, well being, son, leisure. Her limitations came down to time when I looked at complaints of commuting and cooking. There wasn’t simply a single solution by solving cooking or commuting, there were some issue with regulating her time and her kids watching behaviour. Some complaints about having no time at the end of the day due to her responsibilities. It also required me to look at her joys involving spending time with family, iOS games, reading books. Then I looked at what I cared about involving kids and entertainment. In the end I concluded with designing a remote for her kid. Soo its not straight forward but designing an environment is required for her solutions towards cooking or commuting, which I think is beyond the scope of an app. It is not simply solved by an additive delivery system that is incidental, it must be enveloping in experience.
Academic research
Well my background is in psychology and my long term memory likes to mess with me. So I recall a lot of psychological research and facts, that nuances my experiences and perspectives.
So I recalled that people will see things that resemble faces and that working memory is pretty poor… also given too many choices will cause an inability to choose. Then I combined it all into a design for an app for kids. Simplistic, minimal in selection, and time sensitive.
Competitive Research
I looked at one standard app that was YouTube kids. It had all the features of a good app. Simple, as in very linear; time sensitive by having a time limit control. What it didn’t have was a minimal selection, the amount of videos is pretty vast. Also the description says the app is for a 4 year old. I think it could be simpler because 2 year olds have a good grasp on decision making.
The two other apps were pretty complex with 10 or more pages, and one didn’t have a time lock or content refresh. It was pretty terrible. Another was very niched having only Minecraft videos.
Planning
There is a magnitude of cycling effects and entrance points, some are specific to the adults the others are specific to the kids. Most of the cycling points are for the kids. I still need to add an route describing the time limit addition. However there is still assumptions that need to be made because they are independent such as setting up the Chromecast.
Design
The process just involved doing it, since everything was preplanned. There didn’t need to be any major trouble shooting. A lot of it was pretty straight forward. Most of my hair was already pulled out during the user flow. I do need to add the cycling of video choices.. but I didn’t believe it would be descriptive enough to add slides for simply changing text. It would be effective in description for high fidelity due to changing video images.
Usability Testing
I didn’t get around to usability testing. I expect there to be difficulty in sliding right from the landing page to the preference pages maybe due to the cluster of controls. For kids they should only be able to access the main landing page but I can’t seem to find the time to bother my little cousin if it is actually usable. However it is backed by psychological effects that are more consistent in kids because the cerebellum is not fully developed so there is less experiential effects. Most of kids behaviours at that age are driven by the brain stem, so the effects should be consistent making testing in Kids as validation. Still should probably do testing though.
Conclusion
In the future I should design with greater understanding