Ready, Set… SPRINT!
This Article Takes A Look At A Budding UX Designers Experience Through 5 Days Of Sprinting A Problem, To Creating A Solution and Designing Better Prototypes.
To begin the sprinting process, we of course need an idea worthy to sprint about. I love the ease of being able to plan my life using calendars, scheduling events, and yes, I am even thankful for alarm clocks to help me get up every day knowing that I can start the day on time.
With all the apps available to help us organize our lives, why not have the ability to schedule when a text goes out? So, for my 5 day sprint, we will take a closer look at my process and what I discovered in my sprinting journey.
MONDAY-INITIATING THE EXPERIMENT:
Scenario
Imagine receiving several text messages right in a row from your 85 year old grandma. You’re in the middle of a meeting at work, However, She seems lost and confused and you start to message her back to let her know you got her texts and tell her you will be by to visit her in the next few days.
Later, about midnight you’re in bed, looking at your phone and you realize you never did send that message to Grandma that you started to type hours earlier. It’s way too late to send it now. If you did, you might scare Grandma to death, literally. You have a busy day in the morning and hope that you’ll remember to actually send it.
Problem
How to remember to send that text out so it doesn’t get forgotten, yet again. Currently for iPhone users, there is not a solution to send a text out at a specified time.
Proposed Solution
While I’m lying in bed at midnight, I realize I never sent that text. No problem, because with a click of a few buttons right at my fingertips, I can easily schedule that text to send to Grandma at 9:00 AM, tomorrow morning.
Messaging Interface:
As you can see it would be simple to implement an icon into the arrow over icon section, it’s close to your finger tips and could easily add a calendar feature to schedule a specified time to send that text to Grandma.
Currently in that space, there are 2 icons. I feel that when pressing arrow over, the text box area can shrink to allow more room for a third icon option.
READY, SET, SPRINT:
Day 2-Tuesday Sprint
My first sprint, ever started a little rough. Not ever having done a sprint, my focus was a little lost and I felt like I didn’t come up with anything more than what I had already discussed when initiating my experiment. I did, however, come up with a few extra ideas to help implement my idea of icons that would offer the user Affordance, to help guide the user through the UX experience.
In an article written by Paul Bloag, titled “How to Iterate Your Way To A Content-Driven Website”, Paul states that most content websites are not really focused on the user experiences, but rather just the content and the way it’s presented. This presents a challenge to me, in that, although, I’m sure the apple IOS app was designed with the user in mind, for me, it is in a sense, a template. I have to add my design for my target audience into an already formed “template” and still make sure I am designing the best experience possible with the user and end goal in mind.
Day 3-Wednesday Sprint
After reading the article by Paul, I knew that I needed to go deeper into what a user will want to be able to do if they were scheduling a message and go over all the options of how, where, why and what should be implemented. I took an image of my original sprint and started adding everything and anything that I could think of that could be a possibility within this app. What will make it work and what will make it useful to the user.
Taking these initial ideas and going deeper helped to think logically about what I wanted to sketch out to start answering some of my questions. Brainstorming with other peers also helped to gain a deeper understanding into my app as well so you have many minds to help you think about anything and everything that might apply to your idea.
-Crazy Eights
Once you’ve brainstormed, and brainstormed some more, the best practice in your sprint is to create crazy eights. In my crazy eight example above, you can see how I took my questions and ideas and began to rough sketch them out. They sure aren’t pretty, but are just quick and dirty layouts of the possibilities based off of the brainstorming session I had prior. Once different options for your solutions have been drawn, it’s easier to begin to see how it should flow and what will and won’t work. It also helps to see if you are missing anything important that will need to be added. You can ask more questions in this process prior to refining your sketch’s into something more pleasing to the eye.
Day 4- Thursday Sprint:
Thursdays goal was to take my rough sketch’s and create High Fidelity Sketch’s. To do this, I had to nail down the paths that really answered the questions and solved the problems needing to be addressed from Wednesdays sprint. As you can see above, the designs are more refined and show the flow the user will take through the entire process. I then took my High Fidelity sketch’s and brought it to several of my peers to brainstorm how the flow of my app was working and if the end goal of scheduling a text message made sense with this process. I was able to pinpoint New ideas and a simplified process that made more sense to my peers. Again, having new sets of eyes helping me brainstorm gave me ideas of things that I hadn’t seen before. This step was necessary prior to completing screens for prototyping.
Day 5- Friday Sprint-Testing:
Friday is the last day of sprints, and this day is used to take all the brainstorming and iterating of ideas for the prototype and take it to real world users. I wanted to have a variety of users that might benefit in using this feature on their phone.
I created 3 focus groups based off of age and employment/education level. This helped me to analyze the data more accurately so that I could take that into consideration when creating the app for specific target audiences. I added a rough draft prototype into the invision app and came up with a list of questions to go through with each of my focus groups. These questions focused on questions of How, Why, What and Where in regards to the UX of my prototype. I also followed guidelines of testing by taking notes, recording audio data, time data, and creating a measurement of what was expected to happen.
What I learned from testing was that, first, they all loved the idea and felt that they would absolutely use it if it were a feature. Secondly, I learned that I had a design flaw that was an unnecessary step. It cased 5 out of 6 of my test subjects confusion as to why they were being directed down a certain path.
As Emily Grace Adiseshiah of Usability Geek Magazine states in her article titled How To Develop Goals In A Usability Test, A well-designed user interface (UI) does not mean much if your users do not know how to engage with it. It needs to be usable, useful and credible as well as desirable. Testing my prototype with my focus groups, helped me to know if I was passing Emily’s test. Was my design useful, credible and desirable? I could say yes to at least 2 of them, but knew exactly what I needed to do to check off the third item…How to make it useful.
FINAL DESIGN AND PROTOTYPE
After my fifth and final sprint, I made the necessary revisions the prototype and designed it aesthetically to feel like it could fit within the IOS space I was provided with. I felt confident in how I needed to finish the design process and implement the ideas my users had given me from my testing sessions.
Although my 5 days were actually over the course of an entire college semester, I can see how doing these 5 day sprints in real time are very beneficial in the design process. It helps to quickly create information architecture which is a necessary step prior to jumping into designing a prototype. Ultimately, it helped and guided my process to quickly iterate and brainstorm the purpose for my app prior to going to the drawing board. My sketch’s and designs were created with a purpose in mind on what the problems were and how I could solve them.
MY PROTOTYPE:
Task: It’s 12 AM, and you just realized you forgot to send a message you typed out to Grandma. Your task is to find the icon to schedule your text to Grandma to go out the following morning.
Hint: You can schedule it from Grandmas screen directly, or you can schedule it/edit and add new contacts in the messages main screen. (Find the Icons) Either way, in this prototype, your goal is always to schedule a text to Grandma. Enjoy, and Happy scheduling!
