Week 7: Low-Fidelity Prototyping

Conducting user testing over Google Hangouts (Photo by Adam Brodowski).

Design for Testing

Last week we decided to pursue our sketch of a disappearing journal into a semi-interactive prototype. This week was all about figuring out what we wanted to test next. We came up with a few key hypotheses of statements we believed to be true based on our user research and testing the paper prototypes. The point of this exercise is to determine what information we want to prove during our next round of testing.

1. People prefer to reflect daily instead of only after hard situations.
2. People prefer to exert low effort even if the benefits may be less valuable.
3. People prefer to use products with validated sources.
4. People prefer their journal entries to be ephemeral rather than permanent.
5. People want to track their mental health progress.
6. People with anxiety want to share their experiences with other users.

To test these hypotheses, we talked about how we could design prototypes to encourage reactions from users. One of the things we’ve learned during our time at MxM is how to design for testing. That is, design extremes that could be completely wrong so that the user will respond either extremely negatively or extremely positively. This is the most valuable kind of feedback because our users will say things like, “I love this feature because ______” or “I hate this and I would never use it because it doesn’t have ______”.

Keeping this in mind, Sherry made some awesome designs (see below) for the product flow in Sketch and moved it into InVision for testing. For many of the features, we tested two different possibilities. For example, we want to analyze data from the journal entries but weren’t sure how the user would want to see their data. Therefore, we came up with two opposing ideas to get reactions from. As seen in the screenshot below, a word cloud and a color map would be two ways to visualize trends from journal entries.

Two of Sherry’s designs from the InVision prototype.

Our six interviews on Wednesday through Friday went very well! All of our users were excited about the prototype and responded very positively to the idea as a whole. Plus, we now have a more clear direction for what to do next week when making a higher-fidelity prototype.

Another exciting thing about this week is that we prepared for our first sprint, which will begin next week. HJ and I set up a SCRUM board and we are now starting to populate it with epics. On Monday we will all sit down together to come up with the user stories and continue planning for the first sprint.

Until then, Debbie, Sherry and I will be synthesizing for the rest of Friday afternoon while snacking on these donuts:

See you next week!