Journal entry — General Assembly UXDI — week 5 & 6
These last 2 weeks were drastically different than the first 2 weeks of my cohort. As mentioned in my last journal post we were getting into week 5 with Group projects. This is the first time I will be collaborating with other UX designers on a UX project, and I was super thrilled to get started. And it was indeed a thrilling and learning experience.
On Monday after we finished our Project -2 presentation, our instructors introduced us to Project 3 — Designing an App for an established brand/company. We got to read all the briefs and were asked to make our group’s favorite list We were randomly assigned to a group with a group number, and later we picked our project’s client brief by spinning a virtual wheel. We were the last team to pick the client brief, and we chose Outdoor Voices.
We are a group of 3 members, and our first task was to assign a role to each team member, we started our meeting with a small introduction on our background, strengths, dreams, and hopes. Based on that conversation I was the UX design lead for the project and the other 2 members were Research Lead and Project Manager.
When working on a team project I believe it’s good to have a process and clarity on the plan, and we should maintain alignment of project goals throughout the project. Since I have worked on development projects before I was aware of the process and techniques that we need to follow to complete the project on time. I also mitigated some of the project risks so that we are prepared for the unseen. The assigned project manager was unsure about responsibilities and tasks for the project so I initiated the conversation and clarified that we all will be working on all the tasks to get hands-on experience on this UX project but as a Lead or Manager, your main responsibility will be to prepare and manage the plan, document all that is done, and ensure all the deliverables are completed on time.
On the same day we prepared a tentative project plan on an Excel sheet, discussed it, and the next day the Project Manager added a Kanban board on Trello. Our ambitious plan included finishing research in 3 days and starting UX designing sooner, 4 User interviews, 3 design iterations, and 2 rounds of usability testing.
I suggested that we need a day off provided we complete our tasks on time. So we decided to turn off our computers and notifications for this project on Saturdays so that we can relax and refresh.
On the next day, we learned Project Management and Applying Analytics for UX in the class and later we resumed our project work in the afternoon. We started with preparing a Working Agreement for our team so that we work well as a team and are clear with the working code. We mutually agreed on having a day off on Saturday so that we can unwind and relax which worked out well throughout the project.
We continued our work with research on the client by C+C analysis, Heuristic Evaluation, Studying Outdoor Voices Brand’s character, and guidelines.
On Wednesday to observe Veterans Day we were off and since we had our user interviews scheduled for that we decided to meet in the afternoon to work on affinity mapping. We met on Zoom meeting and used a Miro Board to complete affinity mapping together and based on our insights with prepared a problem statement. With 3 members and 3 different ways of looking at the problem, we shortlisted 2 options of the problem statement and sent them to our instructors for approval.
After we got the feedback the next day, we revisited our problem statement to make minor changes and got it approved. We drafted a Persona — Sage Mark. We did time blocking of 8 minutes to come up with solutions/ideas that will help our user (Sage Mark). Then we talked about these ideas in a story format to understand how these ideas will help Sage in her journey. Further to justify how these solutions will fit in our design I used draw.io to draw user flows.
Again, we did 20 mins time blocking to design UI frames on paper and then discussed our frames for the user flows. We critiqued the designs and talked about what’s working and what’s not considering our persona and the brand — Outdoor Voices.
We voluntarily picked user flows to start working on our Low-Fi designs on Friday which also included working on writing content for our frames. After our team finished working on Low-Fi frames over the weekend, as a UX Designer for the team I started working on prototyping wireframes and adding micro-interactions so that we can conduct Usability testing on Monday.
Monday didn’t go as planned as we still didn’t have all the low-fi frames completed with the content on it. We reached out to our usability testing participants to reschedule.
After we had all the designs ready in the afternoon, we reviewed the designs and copy and gave feedback to each other. We made updates on our designs and then I started working on the prototype in the evening. One of the major drawbacks of Adobe XD is that you cannot collaborate well with other designers on it. We noticed that if multiple changes are done and saved at the same time, Adobe XD will only accept changes from only one user and reject all the changes done by other users. So, we had to make changes on our local artboards first, and check with other users before posting the changes on the cloud file first.
To speed up the process, each of us conducted 1 user testing using the testing guide that we pre-discussed. The next day we spent thinking about the branding of the app, we shortlisted the theme using the brand’s existing electronic blue and adding an aqua blue gradient pattern to it. It looked vibrant and different than the brand’s existing look. On Thursday, we shared our branding idea using a mood board and 2 looks of the screen with the instructors at the GA. They found our take on the branding interesting, but they strongly suggested that we stick to Outdoor Voice's current branding and communication style. We reconvened as a group and decided to scratch the new branding and prepare a new Design Guide for the mobile app using the current branding and styling from their website.
Since it’s not difficult to find fitness fanatics we were able to schedule Hi-Fi testing over the weekend. One of the users who is an Outdoor Voices clothing fan loved our take on the app design. We prepared a Global Research Report, final presentation, and practiced presentation delivery over the weekend. Phew!
Hard work pays off! Our instructors loved our presentation, and they were impressed by how quickly we were able to take the feedback and rework our design of the High-Fidelity prototype.
I do not have this case study on my portfolio, but I will write a medium article on it soon. 😊
For the next 6 weeks and holiday break, we worked on our portfolio design for 2 weeks and Client Project — Varuna Tech Inc. for 4 weeks to design their water monitoring dashboard. It was a research intense project and you can read the case study here.
Thank you very much for reading this. I appreciate your support.
