WK06. User Research
This post will talk about : User personas, Ideation process (pain points), and snarios/ storyboards.
Identifying the different features that other apps offer helped me to understand the elements I would like to implement within my app. It also highlighted how the use of Object detection hasn’t been used in this kind of apps revealing a possible gap in the market, and perhaps the underlying complexity of deploying this kind of system.
To start with the creation of my user personas, I first identified the main user groups that would use this app. This was based on my Literature research as well as competitor research.
User Personas
My next step consisted of creating user personas. This helped me to think about and identify the attributes, skill levels, desires, and backgrounds of the user groups I want to target. This technique helped me transition from a global concept of ‘user’ into a concrete ‘persona’ that aids the design process by making use of their potential needs, goals, and frustrations. I would like to highlight that before starting the creation of my personas I considered the possibility of generating ‘Agnostic personas’. This is the definition of user personas that are age, gender, and location-agnostic, in an attempt to be more inclusive. However, after some consideration, generating ‘agnostic personas’ would defeat the point of creating ‘personas’ in the first place since it was trying to cater to as many people as possible.
Data-driven user personas
During the development of the personas, I found that ‘data-driven personas’ were a lot stronger and more compelling than ‘assumption personas’. The key to the creation of ‘data-driven personas’ was the data that backed up the different elements that make up a ‘persona’. In businesses, this data usually comes from other teams, such as the sales or marketing team. Since I don’t have access to this kind of data, I found free online research that helped me back up the creation of my personas and their key traits. I have summarized these findings in the following chart:
User Personas: Kate the volunteer
Kate comprises 70% of the market (or users) and it represents the volunteer group. Let’s remember that the app aims to empower people who are keen on collaborating with the beach survey, but who do not always get the classification right. The following profile defines Kate as a user persona for this project.
User personas – Dani the reseacher
Dani represents 20% of the market (or users) and it represents the researchers’ user group. Even though the app cuts down on technicality and complex vocabulary, it still caters to key data and data quality which have great value to researchers. The app aims to cover the needs of these two user groups and merge the strengths that both have for data collection.
Ideation
As part of the recommended training, I continued with the workflow proposed by the course UX Design Techniques. After finishing with my user personas, I extracted the pain points/ frustrations and used the “Design Charrette” strategy to sketch product solutions. It was suggested the sketching of solutions for every pain point that I could have identified from my personas. Those pain points were listed as:
- Lengthy and difficult lists of categories in which an item can be categorized.
- The lack of a follow-up process after volunteering efforts.
- Technical vocabulary used in beach surveys (mainly in data cards)
- Remember the details of the survey, such as time spent, area covered, weather, etc.
- Not getting an overall summary of the data that has been collected during the beach survey.
Every pain point was sketched and it was the first step toward low-fidelity prototyping of the app’s interface.
Scenarios
The next step in the workflow was Scenario creation and Storyboarding. The exercise of creating Scenarios was helpful to the development of the app, however, I didn’t develop storyboards since I didn’t consider it of high importance to start the wireframing process.
The creation of Scenarios helped me to think about interactions through action descriptions, instead of focusing on the details of the interface. Thinking about the flow of the app was key for materializing some of the functionalities that I wanted to integrate. In this exercise, I created two simple scenarios that would ideally cover all the interactions of the app.
Scenario 1
Kate and Dani are participating in a beach survey/ cleaning event. A news app to collect field information is introduced. They are about to have their first interaction with the product
Scenario 2
Kate and Dani want to review their achievements and their past surveys
The creation of these scenarios made me realize that I was missing the elements of a ‘Home Screen’ or rather the first screen that the user views. I was so fixated on other functionalities covering other pain points, that I wasn’t thinking about the flow of the app during a full interaction. I was also able to think about where in the journey the user needed to grant access to location and camera services, as well as ideating a communication strategy in which I would explain to the user why these services are vital to the app. Finally, it also made me realize that I needed to have more clarity on the steps that the user needs to take to reach the object detection view, which is the focal point of the app.
Questions:
- Am I having too many steps before reaching the object detection screen?
- Can the app handle going in and out of this screen mode without breaking? Is this option really better than having a list of distinct categories and buttons to press?
- What elements do I want to have on my homepage, so that they aren’t distracting and lead the user to the main objective of the app (the beach survey itself)
Next steps
After undergoing the process of understanding my user and bringing their potential needs and concerns into possible features, I think I have reached the point in which I can start materializing an user interface that makes sense, and that is fundamentally based on research. Therefore, my next steps consist of:
- Starting my low-fidelity wireframe, bringing together all of the different learning from the User research.
- From this wireframe, map the user journey through an App flowchart
- Start looking at brand guidelines and decide if I want to incorporate the Precious Plastics look into the app. This project is open source and it offers guidelines on how to use their design elements within a new project.