How I Used an Effective UX Process to Design an App
It can be overwhelming when you’re given the task of coming up with an idea and there are very few restrictions to help you narrow down your focus. That is how I felt in the initial steps of my design process for prototyping a new mobile app in the final class of Coursera’s interaction design specialization.
I tried to think of mind-blowing, earth-shattering ideas, but I never landed on anything that seemed to be feasible and had to continually restart the thinking process. However, I got to a point where I realized I was too focused on trying to make an amazing app that I wasn’t even thinking about what makes an app great. The best apps solve a problem or fills a need.
From there I starting thinking of problems that I face in my daily life. That was the direction I needed to start generating ideas and I landed on one that would help anyone who needs to balance task and meetings during their work day.
Yes, there are plenty of task apps and there are plenty of meeting apps, and there are even some that have both, but I wanted an app that was minimalistic and didn’t treat tasks as meetings, but instead gave a visual representation of tasks around your meetings so you could keep track of what you should work on next. Also, I wanted it to be as clean and simple of a process as possible so users could spend more time completing their tasks instead of managing them.
I started by creating storyboards to visualize the problem and solution in an easy to follow scenario.
From there I started making paper prototypes. This is where the ideation meets reality because you can quickly create and edit the functionality on the fly. The majority of the final features were decided in this paper prototype. This was surprising to me because I didn’t think pen and paper would be good enough to represent a functional application, but it really did help solve a majority of the design issues I ran into during the process.
Another great part about the paper prototype was how easy it was to share and test with other people and get instant feedback. At this point I was past the point of coming up with a single idea to solve daily tasks and now I was able to start breaking up the design into smaller pieces.
Through the early design iterations I realized that users should be able to quickly glance at their task list and see an estimation of time needed to complete each task. And I wanted to visually show the difference between a one-time task and a recurring task.
After planning through some of the information I wanted the users to see, I started thinking about the interaction of completing tasks, what would the calendar look like, what settings would a task need, etc. And once I had them on paper and had them tested I was able to build the initial prototype.
After the first prototype I thought I had almost everything figured out. That was a mistake. I realized with more testing and more reviews, there was always something to improve. While it’s possible to stay in an infinite loop of iterations, my focus was to work on the most important problems. I found problems such as necessary settings, different ways to interact with components on the screen, and missing help text to guide the user along the right path.
Even though I was taking the time to make rounds of changes, the best part of the design process was I was able to progress the fidelity and polish of the design along the way. Pen and paper prototypes turned into a digital prototype that digital prototype eventually turned into the fully polished design worthy of representing my original idea.
What I came up with was an idea to manage your tasks and view them in a way that you could plan your day around meetings. What I came away with was a new understanding and appreciation for a good design process. There is no substitute for getting hands-on user feedback and it doesn’t have to slow down an idea as it moves from wireframes all the way to a fully polished design. Testing and iterating based on feedback work together to build an app that users will love.
