I became motivated when I found that people actually liked my idea of an automated, customizable, contextual, and conversational dashboard mobile app as I started the final design project for my interaction design course. Then the journey began from drawing board, me along with a pile of white paper and a black sharpie, carving into an ocean of unsettling thoughts.
My first idea for how the app should work was to ask my users a lot of questions in order to generate something useful for them: what do you need? what do you want to do? Is this what you want? what else? I envisioned the app was a friendly and pleasant conversation partner, trying to understand my users’ needs and then meet those needs.
But my users seemed to be annoyed by those questions and asked back: Why are you (the app) asking me all these questions? Aren’t you supposed to know a lot about me already as I use you on my phone?
Good questions! The thinking that my app stands alone in my users’ digital environment is not needed; being a smart app that knows about my users without asking a lot of questions is needed and providing intelligent baseline setup is very much needed.
So I turned my app into a bot that gathers information from my users’ existing digital environment to generate intelligence about them: when do they usually get up and start to interact with the digital world, what news do they read, what emails do they access, what do they look up and look at throughout the day…
I was ready for my first prototype testing — take one!
It was excruciating to watch my users clicking on interface elements that they expected to do something for them, but the elements didn’t. Telling my users that “You are not supposed to click on that label on this screen” was not a helpful thing to do, so I sat through the user testing sessions, biting my lips. Every click from my users that didn’t go anywhere felt like a punch on my face.
Compartmentalizing my users’ actions and dictating their paths is not need; building a connected digital environment and providing multiple pathways is needed.
I re-weaved the interface and get ready for take two!
Somewhat like opening a letter from a college admissions office, I took a deep breath before watching the first user testing recording of my prototype from usertesting.com. I was surprised to hear real people whom I had never met nor ever will saying many good things about the app. Finally, I could smile a little when all my re-weaving efforts seemed to have paid off.
Then the shoe dropped. “I probably wouldn’t sign up for the app… It is a better app indeed, but for me to sign up for a new app at this stage, it has to be ‘that much better’ and I have to feel ‘I need it!’”.
Design is the key to win users’ heart; functionality and usability do not seem to be enough. Being desirable is needed.
So I started to work on take three… Design is never ending. For each project, I will always do my best.
I thank Scott Klemmer and his team for guiding me through the journey of interaction design at Coursera. I appreciate my classmates for every comment you left for my work, the insightful heuristics reviews you wrote for my prototypes, and your enormous creativity, consistent and inspiring hard-work: I learned a ton by being on this journey with you!
