Building AllEyes.io — our UX Journey
Let’s just say post-it notes quickly became part of the family.
When we closed the doors on our first venture in 2017, we vowed never to build a product ever again… without testing our assumptions. To understand if there was a real problem that needed to be addressed, to understand the audience and their needs. Well, we had learned our lesson, and started from scratch.
Over the course of the last year, my cofounder Lucas and I have been invited to present our learnings and the UX process for AllEyes.io to London College of Fashion students at their ‘Ideation Matters’ events. Our topic is usually Design Thinking & Human-Centered Design.
“User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function.” — InteractionDesign.org
As a company we feel it’s incredibly important to educate the next generation on how to conceptualise a product, all the way through to MVP build, so they don’t make the same (expensive) pitfalls that we did, when “starting-up”.
We finally decided now was the time to share the steps we’ve taken to build our new platform AllEyes.io, with you.
So, if you’re ready to take the UX journey, read to the end to see what it was all about for us, what we learned, and the tasks we completed to finally get us to where we are today.
What you’ll need:
- Your next business idea
- ‘The 4 Ps’ — Post-its, paper, pens and patience
- Sticky dots / different coloured pens
- A laptop screen recorder (Quicktime player will do)
- A voice recorder (phone works fine)
- A great network of insiders, plus some drinks and snacks to offer them
1. Proof of Concept
The first step. We needed to trial our first trend report and gather feedback in the hopes of proving there was a need for street style and social media trend forecasting, our first assumption.
We scoured social media, gathered a group of budding fashion photographers, took to London Fashion Week, photographed influencers in the thousands and from this, produced our first ever street style trend report.
We forwarded this onto our network of advisors and assumed personas (for us, this was designers, buyers and stylists) for honest feedback and went about iterating our reports in time for the next London Fashion Week.
They were a hit.
2. Guiding Principles Workshop
Our User Experience (UX) design process kicked off with 2 workshops aimed at deciphering who All Eyes is as a company, and who we aim to be. The only people present for this workshop were the founders. The Guiding Principles task was split into the following workshops — Product Personality & Design Principles.
Bring on the team debates…
The Product Personality workshop made us question ‘How will the world see our brand?’ It started with the below exercise:
- Write down 5 personality traits you want your brand to embody… and 5 you do not!
- Share > Critique > Vote with sticky dots
The mission of the Design Principles workshop was to establish the guiding values that drive our brand. To decide this we completed the below task:
- Write down 5 core principles of your brand
- Share > Critique > Vote with sticky dots
After we’d settled on these top 5 principles, another fun exercise that we completed was to assign a celebrity based on their personality and outlook on life. We came back with Leonardo Di Caprio. Gotta love him. Now we often find ourselves asking ‘What would Leo do?’
3. Persona Research
Now it was time to test our assumptions.
At this stage we really wanted to test whether our assumed personas would, in fact, be interested in our new idea. We needed to ascertain what users want, need and expect from a new trend forecasting company.
We wrote a list of job roles/people we thought would be interested in using our new conceptualised service/product/platform.
We then compiled a survey to test our assumptions, and further investigate our potential audience and their needs. (We can recommend Google Forms for this.)
Some questions you may want to consider for your survey:
- What does your job involve day-to day?
- Do you currently use any tools? If not, why?
- What tasks take up most of your time?
- What are the most challenging/annoying/frustrating aspects of your job?
- Who do you interact with in your work and how?
Next job: Ask your network to complete a survey
- Approx 30 participants per role
- Ask open-ended questions
- Ask for specific stories
Once we had received a number of survey responses back (can’t remember the exact number, but it was in the region of 60–80), we gathered the responses and created a ‘persona’ document to bring their true voice into the conversation.
4. User Stories Workshop
Now that we had a better idea of who our users were, and what problems they were facing, we wanted to delve deeper.
This workshop was geared around compiling user stories. For those who don’t know what a user story is, it describes the type of user, what they want and why. A user story helps to create a simplified description of a requirement of your platform/product/service.
For this workshop, we rented a workspace for a couple of hours, and invited approx 12 industry guests along (working within our persona roles). Provide popcorn and wine, and watch conversation start to flow.
For the sections of the workshop that weren’t timed, we wanted to allow the conversations to flow naturally (without stopping to take notes), so for this reason we decided to voice record the whole session as there were loads of great insights we wanted to revisit at a later date. (Remember to ask permission first, and keep it confidential!)
Understanding the needs of your user, and the problems they currently face. We split our workshop into small groups, and asked each team to complete the following tasks:
- Write down as many needs for each persona as possible in a time frame (3–5 minutes, for example)
- Then organise these ‘needs’ into personas and similar categories
- Discuss, and narrow these down into core needs and reword
Here’s a few examples of what we came back with:
“I need regular contact with other industry professionals to share ideas.”
“I need more streetstyle — all current services are focussed too heavily on catwalk.”
“I need a cheaper option.”
By organising these needs into categories, it provided the basis of our product features and user stories. All very exciting — we began to see the All Eyes platform features and how our personas might use it.
5. Design Studio Workshop
Next up we held an open Design Studio session with potential users that reflected our primary personas, and the founders. The aim of this was to collaboratively design basic wireframes for the new All Eyes platform.
From looking back at our user stories from the previous workshop, we were able to put together some tasks for our session. Ours went a little something like this:
Design the ‘search results page’ for a designer who needs:
- to know and keep up with the latest trends
Design the ‘collaborative tools page’ for a stylist who needs:
- to streamline client involvement
Our main goal for the Design Studio session was to rapidly generate ideas, and design collaboratively. We followed the below format:
- Sketch > share > critique > vote with sticky dots
- Come together and create a final design for your product feature/page
- Review
We found it really helpful to voice record this session too, as we had honest insight into the pros and cons of other pre-existing platforms.
This particular session was when it all started to come to life — for a designer like myself, this is the exciting bit. These final collaborative wireframes were the beginnings of our new product.
6. Prototype Design
Using the wireframes from the previous session, we went about designing AllEyes.io V1 — a very messy-looking thing, but the key features and information was all there, albeit ugly AF.
For V1 I designed the prototype on Sketch, and used Invision to link up all the screens for testing purposes. It’s easier than it may sound, I promise you. For V2 and onwards, I moved onto Photoshop. No reason really, just felt more comfortable that way.
7. Testing Sessions (+ lots of note-taking)
Testing Sessions are weird- especially the first.
You’re standing in front of a kind stranger outside of London Fashion Week at 8pm in February, asking them to complete random tasks on a website you know they think is ugly, while you film it, and the weirdest part - when they ask you questions about what it is, all you can do is shrug or reply “what do you think it is?”
It feels weird, but the trick with these testing sessions is to say hardly anything at all — you’ll quickly see that they fill the silence with opinion and UX insight. It’s worth the weird.
How to test:
- Get to know them + their day-to-day work processes — what we call ‘Pub Chat’ (5mins max)
- Explain why you are doing this, not what.
- Give them a scenario and ask to complete the task on your website. Try to give 3 for every person tested. Ideally, you’d be able to film the screen as they perform the task on your platform.
- After each testing session, collate your findings and categorise — you’ll soon see themes between the notes and then you can adjust your designs accordingly. If they’re unable to complete a task, it might be something as simple as a change to the button placement. Small things like this can be the difference between keeping a user and losing a user.
How to structure your testing scenario:
“As a <role>, you are interested in <need> and have visited <website> to help you find this information. Using this prototype, <task>.”
Some tips while testing:
- Don’t answer any questions during the session, instead, say things like “Why did you think that? What did you expect to see?” etc.
- There are no wrong answers — everything is interesting
- Try not to rush them — see where they take the mouse
- Ask them to think out loud — they’ll find this strange, but you’re recording and the insights they’re giving are extremely useful to you!
- Allow for awkward silences — they will fill them
Step 8, is simple. Test > Iterate > Test > Iterate > ….
Over the past couple of years we’ve held testing sessions with potential users on approx 10–15 different occasions, in all different environments (literally - streets, cafes, Skype, co-working spots, our house, swanky offices, you name it), so in doing this process 50 or so times, you soon get used to it.
Always remember that these initial testers have the potential to become your brand ambassadors, so treat them well and keep them sweet. You might also discover personas you’d never thought of before, just through having conversations with people.
To close, our team decided to keep UX at the heart of the business, as we had learnt from our past mistakes. Looking back on all of this research, we’ve found it to be essential in so many areas of our business. Not just in understanding our target audience and product better than ever before, but current problems in industry, competition, pricing structures and so much more. The whole team feels equipped with the knowledge because we’ve chatted with so many personas IRL (and online), and understand them back to front.
After this mammoth UX journey (which is still on-going), we’re incredibly excited to be bringing ‘AllEyes.io’ to you later this year. Follow our journey to keep up with future updates on the creation of our platform — we aim to continually iterate and improve AllEyes.io for our users.
One final piece of advice from us — ‘always test your assumptions’.
