An interesting discovery - User Research for better User Experience
In the 2nd semester, we started the course named User Research and Interaction Design. Before the course, I had encountered the term User Experience but I had not had an overview of the workflow that had to be done. After finishing the course, the stages of the whole process became more familiar to me, but I have to admit that I encountered some issues that were finally solved in the team with my colleagues. It was not so easy as I thought at the start of the project.
The aim of this blog post is not to go in-depth regarding the procedure we went during the course but to give a general overview of project stages. My intention is also to point out some difficulties I faced while working on the project.
What was our case-study about?
We were asked to create a mobile application for a client, in our case it was a Natural History Museum, with a purpose to create more outdoor experiences that enable young kids, educators and parents to experience the “magical outdoors”. The mobile app was supposed to give options for useful activities to explore nature and to be useful both indoor and outdoor as well as over time. The success would be measured in magical outdoor experienced moments.
A brief overview of the stages of our project
was to understand the Museum’s brief, create hypotheses and define a research method.
We started by defining our target groups and their needs. Our main target groups were children from 8 to 12 years, their parents and educators.
After defining target groups, we did some exercises that helped us define our brief, break it into the challenge, and outline a hypothesis for how to solve it.
Our brief: The goal is to create activities that would remind and motivate people to spend time outside.
Our challenge: How to define a „magical moment“ to show people that nature is cool and to find the right tool to explore it?
Our hypotheses: Sometimes parents run out of ideas on how to motivate their kids to spend more time outdoors. If we inspire them, they will integrate “going outside with their children” in their weekly routine.
Based on our challenge and hypothesis, we tried to define what “magical moments” for our target groups are.
After a group discussion, we agreed that the best way to describe “magical moments” was to talk to people who we wanted to experience these moments. We decided to use the method of semi-structured interviews to get a deeper insight into what our target groups wanted and what their needs were.
was to perform the research, point out key findings and define the concept of our mobile app.
With the purpose to find out what parents and children want and feel when it comes to outdoor activities, we conducted personal interviews. Our interviewers were children between 8 and 12 years and their parents. We tried to find out what children wanted, what parents struggled with and what their needs were.
After conducting interviews with children and parents we found out that after a long day in school or at work in their free time parents and children wanted to relax, had fun and some valuable family time. At that point, we excluded educators as our 3rd target group. We put our focus on children and parents and took learning into consideration as a side effect. In any case, educators would be able to use the app just as much as parents.
Upon our interviews' key findings, we defined our parent and child persona, their empathy maps and defined what the “magical moment” for our users was.
For parents a „magical moment“ is when they experience that their children are happy. On the other side, for children, the „magical moment“ is when they spend quality time with their always busy parents, which means that they are eager to have the full attention of their parents.
Our research has shown that working parents usually do not want to spend much time to search the Internet for inspiration on what to do together with their kids – indoor and outdoor. They want to spend their free time with their family. They do not want to search, but want to quickly find what they are looking for!
Our focus became clear. Finding what they are looking for quickly is what parents need to spend their valuable time with their kids. We decided to base our prototype on filtering and multi filtering function because it is useful for getting wanted information quickly.
was to make the prototype concept, define a concept test, present the prototype and test it.
We went through 2 phases in the concept development:
1. Low-fi prototype with Balsamic Wireframes
2. Macro prototype with Adobe XD
As stated in the previous step, our prototype was based on exploring and filtering options. Parents would be able to explore Outdoor, Indoor, DIY, Games and Adventure activities and filter activities by Weather, Duration, Location and Activity Type.
The last phase of our project was to define a test plan of what research techniques we would use and what questions we would ask. We also supposed to add a proposed write up of the results from testing.
Why it was not easy working on the project? What I have learned!
1. Blank artboard looked scary
When we had started our project the blank artboard became one of my greatest fear. I was staring at the whitespace within my artboard and asking myself what to do now? How to start?
2. Team work is not always easy
User experience is really a team sport. I worked with my colleagues who had different backgrounds, ideas and sometimes it was difficult for us to work on the same path. However, I realized that my role was not to come up with the best idea, but to listen and watch more. It is equally important to hone our ability to pull different ideas together.
3. Rejection should become routine
I realized that when we evaluated design as an activity, we spent a lot of our time getting it wrong. There is often a possibility of our ideas rejection. A very small amount of our time will be spent getting it right. But the rejection is only a rejection of an idea and it is part of the process.
4. Ideas need to be worked on
Somehow, I got used to this idea that the first design is not going to be very close to the final version. Artists work with an idea. They nurture it. This does not require ingenuity or creative genius. Some experts say it does not necessarily require a lot of experience either. In my opinion, it simply requires hard work to push through iteration after iteration.
Finally, I can say that going through the entire process of this project work I gained useful knowledge and new abilities. Some new perspectives have been opened that lead me to blue-sky thinking!
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