Rapid Prototyping

My first project at GA on the UXDi course!

Brief:

My user Patric has a demanding job. Once at work he is fully engaged and often in and out of meetings. Even though he is busy, he always takes lunch away from the office but hates deciding where to go. It was my job to design an app that would allow him to maximise the time away from the office eating lunch rather than spending time deciding where to go.

Process - Rapid Prototyping:

User Research

As time was of the essence — there were only 4 days to present back to Patric with a proposal I wanted to give him something to look at as soon as possible to ensure that I was on the right track — or not!. I began with some simple User Interviews which led me to explore some areas that the Patric mentioned in further detail.

Sketches

Initial sketches of the designs were presented to the user and feedback was incorporated into the next design. As the app was relatively simple it was very tempting to make it more complex than necessary for example by including various filter categories. But from the user research it was apparent that the Patric wanted simplicity in the solution.

By analysing the flows involved in achieving simple tasks on the app, we established which screens were required. During the design process Patric was asked what if he didn’t like the choice of ‘food venue’ returned to him?

“If I didn’t like the choice, I would just roll the dice again” — Patric

This quote from Patric introduced the element of a rolling dice whenever a restaurant choice was requested. It fitted into the idea of the ‘mental model’ the client had, yet did not over-complicate the app.

Clickable Prototype & User Testing

It was essential to give Patric something that he could actually hold in his hands and start testing with as soon as possible. I was also able to test with other users and get their feedback.

Users were asked to achieve simple scenarios using this handheld clickable prototype.

This gave essential insight into such things as confusion on layout of screens and where the pain points were.

These again were tweaked and a new iteration of the prototype was delivered to the the client in a short space of time so they could re-test.

Results:

Rapid Prototyping or the process of taking something quite abstract and then making it into something tangible in a short space of time — was well suited to this brief. Ensuring that the user was involved in every step of the design process was also another key aspect on why this method worked for this brief.

Overall I would say that the final product “Choose My Lunch” was something that Patric could begin to use straight away to achieve his objective of taking the pain out the decision of where to go for lunch, however additional features such User Profiles and Preferences could be introduced at a later stage to make it appealing to a more mass market.