Continued MVP Work and Looking Ahead
A holiday week, but with progress
Despite the holiday week, real progress was made across each stream of work — design, development, research, and documentation. We’re not exactly in crunch mode, but with the end of the term rapidly approaching, we’re getting ready to wrap-up new work and start packaging deliverables for our clients and for the class.
Design
A (hopefully) final round of design updates were completed this week on the MVP. A home screen empty state and device list design were added to the MVP to enhance the existing experience and a screen map was assembled to track the MVP UI as a whole.
With the MVP work primarily done, that frees up the team to work on the next version of design. Work began this week and will go in front of generous internal “users” early next week to test out any potential issues with usability.
Development
Development on the MVP is almost done with the addition of the new screens and states, we’re almost wrapped up on this phase of work for the project. This will free us up to focus on design and ideation for a bit before we complete our class deliverables.
Research
On this front, we’ve started conducting external research with representatives from our target audience (coworking space staff and office managers by proxy) to better understand their perception of Zensors as a system and as a potentially valuable tool. Our format leverages more time than previous sessinon formats at 45 minutes per session, and we’ve created a survey that functions as a relatedness gauge. Essentially participants are primed with an overview of how the system works and what components make up the system and then they’re asked to quantify the relatedness of each component to every other component in the system within the context of a defined use case.
With the holiday week, our sessions have not been exactly going as scheduled (we’ve had a number of no-shows), but so far our findings are promising. As we collect more data, we’ll see how this method goes. We’re optimistic that it could yield directional data for onboarding, feature positioning, and experience architecture. If it goes as we plan, it’ll give more accurate insight into the mental model of successful users that we and other designers and researchers (even our future selves) can apply towards more successful products.
These longer sessions are also allowing us to implement a longer laddering interview (we’re trading off sessions with interviews with sessions with the survey). The longer format for these interviews is providing better insight into the day-to-day priorities and concerns of our target user, which in turn will help us provide more content for any kind of backlog going forward.
Documentation
Everyone’s favorite. With the end of term in sight, we wanted to get started on our deliverable set well in advance. Outside of the work we’ve been doing on building out a front-end for Zensors, design and content development for the project website are underway, with development on that starting next week.
Building off of our website from Spring, we not only want to tell the story of the work we’ve done in the phase, but do that in a way that feels fresh and engaging. The website concept we’re aiming towards (not seen here)is more of an evolution of what we’ve done so far, embracing what’s worked and letting the less successful things go. And we’ll use more color.
Coming up
In the coming weeks, we’ll finalize a next phase visual layer for the UI and hand design files off to the client to support that. We’ll complete this round of research and analysis and conduct a final round focused on the new visual design. This project is quickly wrapping up, and preparations for final deliverables are underway, so we may share more on that if interesting developments arise.
