Incast-Helping make your life easier!
Hobbies. Interests. Life.
Just one week into the UX design course and I have inculcated an insane passion for UX designing. Hi, my name is Sucheta Mehra and I come with a background in Digital marketing. This is my first case study presentation as a UX design student at RED academy. The purpose of this case study is to familiarize myself with the UX design process and be able to create a low fidelity prototype of a mobile app for a defined user persona.
What’s the catch?
The catch is to interview a classmate, figure out what is the one biggest challenge in his/her life, build context around it and create an app to help your friend overcome that challenge. As part of the exercise, I interviewed Gabreil Morillo who is a professional video recorder from Venezuela. Gabe lives in Toronto and likes travelling to new places.
Probing
In order to unveil insights and gain a better understanding of Gabe’s life, I prepared a list of questions to ask him prior to our interaction.
Q. Do you relocate to new places often?
Q. Do you live far away from family?
Q. Where do you live currently?
Q. What are some of the challenges in your life?
Q. Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
Q. Do you commute long hours?
Q. Do you drive?
Q. Would you love to connect with people nearby through a common interest such as music, photography, cooking etc.?
Q. Would you love to share your interests and hobbies with people nearby and find opportunities to work together?
So, based on the interview answers, some characteristics that describe Gabe are — Gabe lives in Toronto and likes to move around new places. He cooks his own food, loves music, commutes via street car and is looking for a job. Some of his challenges include staying motivated throughout his job search and being able to prioritize and schedule things effectively to beat the ever-illusionary time crunch.
Next thing, as a group activity, we came up with two more user personas and clubbed some common traits under different categories such as likes, dislikes, challenges, personality, relationship etc.. Then, organized some of them in a way that together they narrate a meaningful story (loved the experience!). This activity gave birth to a new user persona of a creative digital nomad and the characteristics that describe him are listed below:
# He travels quite often # Lives away from family # Cooks his own food# Commutes long hours and,# Is looking for job opportunities in his new location
Based on the needs of the final user persona, I created an app called “Incast” to help him connect with like-minded people in his location and make constructive use of his time when not working. Incast is primarily for those who often relocate to new places, live far from family and lack real social experiences in life. Users under this persona can use this app to give a shout about what they want to do and choose on a map where they want to do, record a short video and simply cast. People who share an interest or hobby with him will view the cast and be able to express interest in joining them. This activity could be related to a hobby, a special interest, entertainment, dining, social gathering or a sport. Here’s a sketch of a basic interface flow:
Prototype
To start with, I created easy to understand low-fi paper prototypes of the app to visualize the whole concept. Five screens shown below clearly mark user’s journey from signing up or creating an account to sharing your first thoughts using the app.
Usability Testing
Well, there’s nothing worse than an app that nobody uses and so, testing an app is more important than creating one. When I tested the app with a few users, they liked the idea of adding a radius feature and choosing a specified audience. There’s still lot of room for improvement before marching towards mid to high fidelity prototypes.
Mid-High Fidelity Wireframes
Summary
The creative digital nomad could now use this app for connecting with people in his immediate neighbourhood through a special interest in multiple ways. Some great ideas are listed below:
# Find a buddy to join him for a movie
# Cook a variety of meals with people in neighbourhood
# Form a sports team
# Find buddies who love music and video recording and create a band/team
# Request ride to a common place and back to your area
# Find a hobby mate with whom he can practice regularly and push his hobby to level next
# Form a study group if preparing for an exam together
# Go for dinners together
# Order food together to meet the minimum amount for delivery to doorstep
As a quick wrap up, the entire process had to undergo a lot of iterations at each step accompanied with lot of learning. As my first foot into the UX design, I am glad to accomplish thus far and look forward to creating more cool stuff in future.
