Author: Shruti

As part of the working class, Prof.Armstrong and I talked to groups individually about their apps, based on their presentations from the previous classes. Students worked on their low fidelity wireframes and began creating visual representations of their brand language.

Prof.Armstrong ended the class by revisiting her lecture on User Testing 101 (see blog post from Day Thirteen for quicknotes). Students left class with the intention of doing 3-5 user tests to identify patterns in their user tests.

Groups presented their first milestone for the Final App project to give the rest of the class a progress report on their app. This included their mission statement (an ‘elevator pitch’), their app strategy, structure, personas, insight from their online surveys, information architecture and brand voice.

(Happy Halloween!)

Online surveys
Groups created Google form surveys with thoughtful questions based on the results of the interviews that they had already conducted, and could potentially fill in the missing gaps in their research. Links to each group’s surveys:

• Tell us how much of a mess you are!
• What’s your type?
• The road less travelled
• Clear your headspace
• Stressed out when you veg out?

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After curating questionnaire’s Prof.Armstrong took the class through presentations about user testing and brand voice.

User testing 101 (quicknotes):

• What do you want to get out of testing?
  Understand your goals
• Research relevant product information
  Look into the history, the potential future, competitor analysis
• Understand your users
  Look into their demographic, locations, user patterns
• Define a successful outcome (individually, then as a group)
• Who is your biggest competition?
• There are different types of user testing:
  Natural, Scripted, Decontextualised, Hybrid
• There are different types of tasks:
  Direct (technical) with clear instructions and Scenario (use case) which is more realistic
• A closed task has a defined success or failure
• An open-ended task is conducted to determine how your user behaves
• Card sorting is an exercise that gives you insight on how your user might categorise activities into groups. It will help you name different sections of your app.
• MVP or minimum viable product is the minimum your app can do to be its most functional self.

Journey Mapping

To practise synthesising and analysing research for the final exercise, we conducted a speed journey mapping exercise. After assembling into their groups and discussing the interviews they conducted over the weekend, everyone wrote down their information on post-its of one color, such that each data point had its own individual post-it (e.g. age of the interviewee, body language, how the interviewee felt about a certain service and their occupation are all unique data points)

 

After creating a bank of data points, groups created clusters. They put their post-its in groups that could belong to a similar category. By synthesising data into clusters that were contextually relevant to the information gathered, categories were created along an x-axis, and named on different colored post-its.

  

These clusters were re-evaluated and organised into a matrix into three categories — thinking, feeling and doing. The resulting clusters read like a table, so that each post-it (or data point) was connected to a thinking, feeling or doing action as well as one of the categories that they came up with as a group.

As soon as these were reorganised into the table with categories along the x-axis and thinking, feeling, doing along the y-axis, groups noticed that there were missing gaps in their table with fewer post-its in certain areas. This became their pain points, and regions for opportunity areas.

Using the opportunity areas as ideas for potential features that their app could have, each member of the group came out with a ‘How might we…’ statement, to express how their app could fulfil their user need.

Final exercise  – App

Students approach this final exercise over the next few weeks in groups, acting as a functioning start-up. The worksheet separates this exercise into 4 main sections:

• Part One: Define/Research/Brainstorm
  Identifying a need, a target audience, creating a mission statement and a brand identity
• Part Two: Costs/Market Strategy
  Staff, structure, location, investment, budget and value proposition
• Part Three: Build
  Architecture, Skeleton, Wireframe
• Part Four: Evaluate/Test
  User testing

Keep in mind the 5 planes of user experience:

• Strategy
• Scope
• Structure
• Skeletal
• Surface

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In this class, students wrote down individual ideas for an app on post-it notes and stuck them on the wall. These ideas were clustered into larger themes that came out of these individual ideas – Pets, Music, Art & Design, Food, Health & Safety, Sustainability, Language & Typography, Organisation, Social and Travel.

Students then wrote their initials on 2 ‘decision dots’ (round colored stickers) and placed these on them on the 2 ideas they would most like to work on as a final app for this class.

By process of elimination, groups were formed based on which ideas got the largest number of decision dots. The students that wrote the post-its that were chosen, pitched their ideas to the rest of the class, and the final groups that formed were, an app for:

• travel
• vegan & vegetarian food spots
• identifying typography in public spaces
• mental health
• pets

The rest of class was spent in groups discussing Part One of the exercise.