Faigy Learns UX

My journey through General Assembly's 10-week User Experience and Design Immersive (UXDI). March-May 2015.

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Final Project! Here We Go...

For our fifth and final project, we’re working with our teams to solve a user experience problem for a real client. Our team is working with a client that has a product with a lacking internal user management system. In order to set-up the service, a client-side administrator needs to setup user permissions for all the stakeholders using the product in their company. Our team’s job is to make this process more intuitive. 

If we’re successful, hopefully this company won’t get as many calls to their customer service team essentially asking them to do things the client can do on their own. Of course, the client often doesn’t realize then when calling in, and the team is happy to help. However, the more a client can easily do on their own, the happier the clients will be and the freer customer service will be to delve into larger issues.

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Would You Buy Home Cooked Food?

It’s been a while since my last blog, so I have a lot of catching up to do here. We are halfway through the fourth of five projects in our program, and this one is a passion project. All of my team members are foodies, and so we agreed to work on a food-centered project together. 

We came across an interesting startup called Meal Sharing, which allows people to host or be a guest at a home-cooked meal. Our team is designing for a new feature which will allow people to buy and sell home-cooked food for take-out or delivery. Essentially, an Etsy for amateur chefs. 

This is actually a difficult problem to solve. As we learned through interviewing potential users, food is a deeply personal thing. We need to trust that cleanliness standards and dietary restrictions are respected. Food has the potential to make our bodies feel fantastic or incredibly sick, and when we eat someone else’s food we’re trusting them with how our bodies feel. 

We also learned that people feel very comfortable going to potlucks with friends, acquaintances and friends-of-friends and eating all the food there. When asked to define what made them feel comfortable eating food at potlucks from people they don’t know well (or at all), many people found it difficult to explain. Intellectually, people knew that eating random contributions at a potluck is not actually safer than buying home cooked food from someone in your neighborhood. However, the level of familiarity they had with the cook, even just by meeting them through a friend at the potluck, increased their feeling of safety tremendously. 

From these key insights, we learned that our Meal Sharing feature must make customers feel familiar with a given home chef. Therefore, we prioritized making a chef’s profile page robust, including a general introduction to the chef (aka a short bio), pictures of the food and the kitchen, and of course customer reviews.  

Here is a preview of our chef profile page, which is a medium-fidelity wireframe for the purposes of testing and iteration in the future:

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There are no second class citizens in UX.

UXDI Instructor

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Writing Believable User Stories

For our third project, I took some time to flesh out our personas with really compelling user stories. As a team we developed three personas that we felt accurately reflected our users based on surveys, phone interviews, and in-depth interviews. 

Afterwards, I sat with each persona and tried to imagine what would compel them to use a group story feature in Timehop. Each of our personas has a different social media style, profession, age, and interests. The way they use Timehop and how they choose to create or interact with shared stories are distinctly different from each other. 

Our team built three personas and initially based them on our survey that shows us how people define themselves in relation to social media: a mingler who reads a lot and posts at times, a creator who posts often, and an observer who reads a lot but rarely posts anything of their own. About half of our respondents self-identified as minglers and a quarter each as creators and as observers. Therefore, the mingler is our primary persona, but our secondary and tertiary personas has a significant effect on app design decisions as well. 

Here are the personas and their stories: 

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AppMapping

My group is making great progress on our current project, and as a part of my share of the work I volunteered to build our appmap. Since I geek out when it comes to organizing, I am having a lot of fun learning about the differences between appmaps and sitemaps and making sure I get every one of our app’s functionalities in it. 

It seems that while a sitemap is focused on categories of information, an appmap is focused on categories of functionality. 

After a number of iterations, here is where our appmap is at the moment:

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... empirical evidence indicates that consumers may experience negative emotional reactions, such as anxiety or stress in response to product complexity

Excerpt from “Feature Fatigue: When Product Capabilities Become Too Much of a Good Thing”

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People are Fascinating

I’ve been finding the process of interviewing people to be incredibly interesting. There is always so much stirring and colliding beneath the surface. Often, people are so happy that someone wants to know about it all.

I’m learning that people want to share their thoughts and opinions about anything and everything, including a kitschy app. It’s amazing how insightful someone can be about a service that seems so simple and straightforward. I’m also learning that nothing is simple or straightforward.

In our current project, we’re exploring how to build a feature into Timehop that will allow for people to share stories with other people. Timehop itself is a simple app, or so it seemed to meet first. Through speaking with many people, though, I now see that even an app that appears humble elicits so many different responses.

Through Timehop, I’m learning about how people relate to nostalgia and that many people share personal things like photographs with a select group of people. Through asking people to reflect on their experiences with services that offer stories from your past, such as Facebook’s Year in Review and Google+ Stories, I learned that people enjoy reflecting on their personal growth as well as reliving forgetting memories. There was delight and joy in seeing a story or video automatically appear, especially when it seemed to reflect one’s year well. Some people chose to edit their videos, but almost everyone I spoke with agreed that they really enjoyed that most almost all the work was done for them (and that they would not have taken the time to do it themselves).  

There were also some things people would rather forget, as Facebook learned the hard way in 2014. This is a really difficult problem to address: how does a service auto-generate a video for you, while editing out the memories that are uncomfortable or upsetting? At this moment, I have no idea. 

Interviewing people for this project and in past projects has me thinking more seriously about a role that involved more interviewing and research in the future. Part of my comfort level I ascribe to studying journalism in my undergraduate years, but another part of it I attribute actually enjoying the process of getting to know people and uncovering what’s beneath the surface. 

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One of the horrible words we use is 'users'...I would prefer to call them 'people.'

Donald Norman

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Next Project: Add Group Stories to Timehop

Photo Source: The Next Web

This week we’re assigned our third project of this 10-week course, and it’s our first group project. In this project, each team is assigned a different service with a specific feature to add on to this service. My team was assigned Timehop and charged with adding the ability for users to create a share stories. 

As one team member astutely observed, stories unfold over time, which is most likely why services like Facebook, Google+ and Pocket wait for the end of the year to give users an overarching story. Timehop, in it’s current construct, shows you what you were saying or doing on exactly this date one, five, or eight years ago using your social networks and photos. A part of our challenge in adding group stories to Timehop will be weaving together posts and images from a period of time without detracting from the lightweight nature of the app. 

But before we embark on generating solutions, our team really needs to better understand the problem...and you can help us do that! If you have two minutes, take our super-quick five question survey: 

http://goo.gl/forms/g9WYk6imtR

Thanks so much in advance, and looking forward to sharing our findings and results with you right here on this blog.

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Quietly observing users is more valuable and the real reason to go into the field.

Nielsen Norman Group (via uxcarly)

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25 posts!

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Project 2: Done!

It’s the end of two long weeks, and my prototype and class presentation are finally done! It feels great to be up to here. 

In case your curious here in the final iteration of the prototype I posted on this blog last week: http://invis.io/2S2M27EYD 

It’s hard to believe that this is where the project was just under two weeks ago... 

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Yes.

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Overhauling My Checkout Form

At first, I had a multi-page checkout process for my current UXDI project. Even though the process was clear and could have sufficed, I changed it for two reason: 1) one user suggested that s/he’d like the whole checkout form on one page and 2) I read this great article about accordion forms by Leon Wroblewski. 

Though I don’t typically change my design based on the feedback of one user, reading Wroblewski’s piece brought into focus for me the perfect way to simplify the form using a single webpage. 

Before:

After:

I love feedback, so tell me what you think in the comments! 

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Forms are Walls

“The Important Field” by XKCD, https://xkcd.com/970/

Our UXDI instructor describes forms as follows:

“It’s like a wall between a user and whatever it is that they want.”

YES. Forms are like walls, and many users will hit that wall and turn around. At my last job, we often debated how many elements to ad to our email sign-up form. On one hand, it’s nice to have more information about a person so you can send more specific and personal emails. On the other hand, the more you ask, the less sign-ups you’ll get. 

I always advocated for asking the user less in our email sign-up. I often lost that battle, but looking back I think it’s a good indicator that I’m a good fit for UX because I was always thinking in a user-centered way. I wanted our forms to be minimal and easy. 

As an aside, I was also fiercely protective of our newsletter email list and would not let emails go out more than once a month. I knew our users trusted us with their personal contact information, and I refused to violate that trust. Our email list did grow over time, in part by word-of-mouth. I like to think the fact that we only sent quality emails once a month and never violated or audience’s trust helped us grow. 

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First Wireframe Prototype: Done!

Building a prototype out of wireframes made in Omnigraffle 6 took me the better part of two consecutive days, but it’s finally done! 

It’s a very rough draft, but feel free to explore it and leave your feedback in Invision’s commenting system: http://invis.io/F22KTH6MZ

The prototype is not very robust at the moment, and it’s built to follow a user through finding Marvel’s comic book “Amazing Spider-man #16,″ add the version with “Cover A” to your cart, view your cart, and then checkout as a guest who does not login.

Here’s a sneak peak at the homepage: 

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Be a guide, not a map!

General Assembly UXDI Instructor