1. Intro
General Assembly is an organization that offers a range of career-change oriented bootcamps, as well as workshops based loosely in the tech world. Many students of the aforementioned bootcamps devote upwards of 60 hours a week to their coursework and suffer from a breakdown in time management skills as a result.
With an eye toward helping their students manage their work life balance, GA hired William Hyde Industries to address time management through a feature integration into an existing app used by the student population.
The sole employee of WRHM Industries is the eponymous Will Hyde. As a UX designer with a background in education and writing, he brings specialties such as research and writing from his educational background in the liberal arts. In addition to time-tested UX research methods, design tools such as Sketch and Invision were used to craft the prototype of the feature integration.
Because new cohorts start at GA on a regular basis, the scope for this project was both short term (<2 weeks) and limited in application (a single feature integration). It occurred from January 21st to 31, in 2020. The budget consisted of unlimited coffee, almonds, and lozenges, all of the highest quality.
2. Process
The UX process began with a round of user interviews of current and former GA students. Interviews were recorded using the OTTR app and later transcribed by Will. Questions were formulated with intent of discovering the triumphs and trials undergone by GA students, with an eye toward providing them some relief. Transcripts filled in the gaps between digitized notes taken during the interviews.
Insights gleaned from the interviewees were recorded on post-it notes and sorted through affinity mapping to reveal trends in the data. Two of the major threads related to the lack of control students felt over their time. One affinity grouping was represented by the “I” Statement: “I’m over-scheduled, beholden to work and other commitments.” Another was: “I don’t feel in control of my own time”. These statements reflected student statements from the interviews that outlined the sudden, seismic shock that occurs when starting one of the GA programs, and the difficulty in maintaining other obligations when one’s daily work schedule is unpredictable and subject to sudden time-dilation. In short, students were falling behind on their other obligations, such as helping family, taking care of business outside of school, etc.
AFFINITY MAPPING
Based on these insights, I crafted a persona for a user named Adelaide, a 25 year old student at GA who is struggling to keep up with her obligations outside of GA, as well as having difficulty keeping track of her schedule due to the changing time commitment of her GA coursework.
PERSONA
PROBLEM STATEMENT
After rapid sketching ideation, I landed on a feature integration for Google Maps, an app that several users in my research pool claimed to use. I added a plus symbol to the interface when users have already added one destination. I neglected to put this new feature (or one similar to it) on the very first screen of google maps because I did not want to clutter the initial interface, and because most of my users used google maps primarily for single destination trips, only needing more scheduling or planning power when their work-life balance threatened to spiral out of control.
I also added clock symbols to the destinations in Google Maps once multiple stops had been added. This reflected users’ desires to be able to react to schedule changes on the fly, changing their commutes, and knowing their new arrival times to their other obligations without having to start the planning process from scratch.
PAPER PROTOTYPES
During usability testing with paper prototypes, user behavior indicated that the plus symbol was visible, but possibly not big enough. Due to the seemingly minor nature of this comment, I did not change the size of the icon for Mid-Fi testing. This proved to be an error in judgment, for the error increased in severity in the Mid-Fi clickable prototype. One user did not see the plus symbol, tapping everywhere else on the screen.
PAPER PROTOTYPES AND MID-FI
Another error occurred in paper prototype testing — a user did not know that they could change their arrival time as well as their departure time. As a result, I changed the presentation of the departure / arrival menu in the Mid-Fi clickable prototype. I eliminated the clock icons and added a swipe-able menu at the bottom of the screen that appeared once multiple destinations were added to the route. By swiping up, the user would reveal options to change the departure and arrival times of each of their commitments.
Unfortunately, this feature encountered a setback in Mid-Fi testing as well. One user saw the menu at the bottom of the screen but did not realize they could swipe it into view. They believed the information visible was all that was featured on the menu, as opposed to it only being the first line of many.
PAPER PROTOTYPES AND MID-FI
However, by and large the usability tests were a success. Three out of four users successfully added another stop to their daily schedule, planning out their route in advance, and were able to change the departure / arrival time in order to respond to sudden changes in schedule.
SCREEN FLOW
Going forward, the plus symbol needs to be increased in size, with more space within the icon between the + and the O components to improve discoverability. In order to reinforce the departure menu’s functionality, clock icons could be re-added to the search fields of the destinations, providing a second route to the same destination.
3. Next Steps
Drawing from research, I learned that students want to keep track of their commitments and commutes, preferably in one of the calendar apps. For this reason, I want to explore the possibility of a Google Calendar integration, whereby the fully planned out route may be applied to the day’s entry in the calendar, visible through a thumbnail photo-link that opens up the “saved trip” in Maps.
