Hen Planner App

For General Assembly UXDI 10 London

The Brief

For week 1; rapid prototyping, of the General Assembly course I was asked to find a problem that I could explore, design an app to resolve this problem and test the prototype.

Problem Exploration

I prepared a list of open ended questions to use in an interview format with my partner; Jen. This provided quite a few leads for me to explore further.

“I’m organising a hen do and I have paper everywhere… I have so many different lists of who is attending”.

I further discussed some of the issues highlighted with Jen and used a visual method; concept mapping, to capture the responses. This method also helped me to dig deeper and find out the cause of some of the issues.

“All the Hen’s and Bridesmaid’s are on different social media platforms and some are not on any so I communicate with them using email/ text message”.

The Issue

Jen is trying to organise a hen do but is having to use different methods of communication and as a result the responses are all on different social media platforms.

I replayed the issue back to the participant to confirm my understanding and found further details of why the hen do was so important.

“The bride is my best friend; she’s my oldest friend. I’ve known her since we were in primary school. I want to make sure her hen do is brilliant”.

I decided that this was the problem that I could help resolve.

The Objective

Provide the means to communicate from a single common platform as this would solve the problem of using different social media to plan the hen do. Ultimately, to provide Jen with the ability to collate a single list of attendees.

First Concept

The very first concept was a simple sketch with intentions of including hen do games and hen do props, providing access to all the hens.

Jen provided positive feedback when we discussed the sketch. However, during the process of writing out the use cases and user flow I realised that Jen’s main objective was to have one single list of attendees and everything was a distraction from that.

The Happy Path

I re-focussed the first concept to include the priorities I had identified based on the Jen’s needs. Jen’s happy path consists of:

• Send details to the other hens.
• A common area where discussions with the other organisers can take place.
• Manage a single list of attendees.

Prototyping the App

I designed the app and then used the sketches to make a clickable prototype to test the app. My main test areas at this point were:

• Can a user perform tasks on this app without my help?
• Does the app solve the Jens’ issue?
• Could this app be improved?
• What features could be included in the future?

To test the app I put together a basic scenario and a list of tasks for the Jen and other user testers.

“You are organising a hen do and you need to communicate the details to the hens. You have already logged into the app which is on your phone”

The clickable prototype can be found here.

The Happy Ending

Jen loved the concept app and was keen to see it developed in time to help her plan the hen do with the other brides maids.

As it is a hen planner app, Jen felt that some fun factor could be included in future versions. We discussed including a video/ music with the hen invite from either youtube or uploaded by the organisers.