Introduction
My name is Sam Nasir, and I’m currently a Student at Ironhack. On Friday, the 25th of October we got a project to create a Wellness App which was due on Wednesday the 30th of October. Follow me on my journey from Interviews, to Sketch and finally to the prototype.
Articles
To begin with, I had a hard time choosing between the themes within Intellectual Wellness. Which lead me to to conduct a mini interview with my class mates, where I picked five themes and had them rate these themes from 1–5. 5 being a Hell Yeah, 1 being a Hell No and 3 being neutral. The results ended with a clear winner of articles.
After choosing the theme of “articles” within Intellectual Wellness. I had to dig deep into what an article actually is and really define what it is. My research showed me that there are two different types of articles. They can be split into Empirical Articles and Literature Articles.
Empirical articles reports “original research” through labs and testing and discussions. Whereas, Literature Articles focus more on already published material and try to add gaps in knowledge, suggest steps or define problems.
Survey
Before heading into my survey I started to think about the goal, what do I what do I want find out through my survey and the conclusion I reached was Why do people read articles? Do they care about the source? Do they care about the outlet? And finally, do they care if the information they are reading is reliable? and if so how do they determine that as a reader?
Given that this was my goal, I based all of my question around that. I proceeded by finalising the survey questions and posting it through slack to the UX/UI site. I regrettably didn’t get the results I wanted because I didn’t send it to multiple channels. The answers I got were very mixed as well so it was hard determine the results.
Interview
Moving on, I formulated some of the questions I had from my survey and made them into “better questions. Most of the questions I had in the beginning were “multi choice answering” questions which meant that I didn’t have to write a lot in the beginning. It surprised me how many people actually started to “validate” why they chose certain answers without me actually asking them to.
I believe that this was quite helpful in my research process since they gave additional information that I didn’t even have to ask for. Moreover, I kept my short answer questions towards the end so that I could “warm them up” with the simple multi choice questions.
This meant that most of the people I interviewed became quite interested in the topic and got fired up, so the questions that was really inline with the goal I set earlier was coming up towards the end.
Key findings: They want the information fast, people with a “studious background often compared their information”, “ The way they conducted their research depends on their goal”
Idea
As result of the interviews I conducted, I came up with an idea of having a database of some kind immediately. Since, I made some key discoveries during my interviews about how most people with a studious background often compared their information while conducting their research, that they wanted the information fast and they did care if it was reliable when conducting an interview.
I didn’t really come up with any other ideas, since I wanted a fast quick way for my users to gather information.
Brain Storming
Moving on, I started my brainstorming session by thinking of the landing page. I thought the if I was going to focus on the time efficiency then the search bar should be the landing page, and from their they have to put in a key word to then go on to the next page with the related articles according to the key word you chose. I had an algorithm in mind which is similar to Googles page rank, where they idea is that if enough “websites” are sourcing one particular source then it has to be reliable, and there for it’s placed in the top searches.
Moreover, Googles also takes into account what is relevant, when it was published etc. I wanted my app to be different from google, however I didn’t dislike the Idea of “Pagerank”, so I wanted to bring this idea to an app where scientific articles and university publications by professors and university students is easily assessable for anyone who is interested in accessing that kind of information.
What I concluded from the brainstorming was that I needed a to have a search bar, that takes you to the articles sorted by said algorithm and then once you get in to the article, I want the user to be able to easily navigate to the function where they can see who the author is, when it’s published and copy rights etc.
Persona
I then created my persona which was based on my research and brainstorming, the result of which being Julia. Julia is a Physics student who has just started her degree at university. She got an assignment by her professor on astronomy and she is having a hard time figuring out
Paper Prototype
Furthermore, I went on to the paper prototypes. I started with doing “crazy eights” according to the brainstorming I did earlier. Which meant that the first slide I made was the search bar with three Icons at the bottom.
Testing
My first testing was quite successful, it was with two people form the other course here at Ironhack. They didn’t understand the first two screens which were not so obvious. However, when they went to the third screen and onwards they realised what my app was about, that it was a “database” for articles and publications.
However moving on, with other testers it was made painfully clear to me that the titles of the articles on the second page was too short for the user to realise that they were the actual articles rather than other options for “more articles”.
I also found out that not a lot of people liked the heart icon that I had from the beginning, which I later then switched out to a bookmark icon.
Another crucial change that I made was to remove my metrics page and put that info in together with the “info” page to save space and clicks.
Sketching and Testing
I then proceeded with sketch and tried to put my “amended” work directly on to sketch instead of doing it on paper again, as it would take more time. When I finally finished my first version of the prototype on Sketch I did a test quite late in the evening and took down some key notes for amendments to work on in the morning.
My testing showed me that I needed to make some iterations on my Icons and the titles on my second screen which was the titles of the articles, or the “results” of the search. It was still clear that that page still wasn’t clear enough for the reader.
What I did to change that was to clear of the space from the top so fit in more space for the titles, so it actually looked like articles. Instead for “sub searchers”.
Iterations on the Prototype
First version on sketch:
Second version:
Final Prototype
After numerous amounts of testing and considerations, this is what I ended up with, a search function that quickly takes you to a page where there are articles based on the the key word, within the article there are two pages, an article and a info page: the article page is where article is and the info page is to find out about publication, copy rights recommended and quotations.
However, in this prototype I wanted the user to get to cited by two show how many reliable sources have actually used the app and another slide what was added was the bookmark slide that was meant to show that you could actually save the articles
Ideally I would have loved to work more on the fifth screen, specifically on cited by and recommended.
Moreover, I would love to add a interactive button that changes colour to black on the fourth screen. “the bookmark button”
Conclusion
First off, I would like to say that I really enjoyed working working on this project! I loved the research stage and connecting it though brainstorming was the most fun part of the project. I also really enjoyed reading about the different wellness articles in order to find an interesting topic to work on.
Moreover, there were also stages that I didn’t enjoy such as the presenting part and making the presentation, not that I found it hard or anything but it wasn’t as fun as the first stages.
Learnings
I learned that there are a few things I need to work on personally in order for me to improve on these kinds of projects.
- I need to work on my time management, when to switch from prototype, sketch to presenting etc. I feel like sometimes I’m spending too much time on things like iterations or drawings, instead of testing.
- I also feel like I need to practice on Sketch and improve on the detailing and become more accustomed to it as well.
Future plans for the project
Iv’e thought about how to make a “profit” off the app and the best ways to do it, first of all I believe that ads is probably the easiest way to go. However also the most boring way, who wants to see ads all time really? You could have ads for a “free version” and then have a paid version where you don’t have to see the ads.
Another way, that I thought of was through copy writing, working with all of these universities and outlets, I could potentially partner with them in a similar way that Spotify partners with artists and licence the information out to paid users who are in university of have jobs that require extensive amounts of research.
Moreover, I would love to add a function within the app that recognises the pattern of searches and suggests Articles based on previous reads. This function is based on my research that says that a lot of people who have read articles actually read them for fun.
Link to Google docs presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1u17fX7x_G7GLqg4GY8uzyQYMX5k9TjOkvnN7dXrkt1s/edit?usp=sharing
