Journal entry — General Assembly UXDI — week 3 & 4
Today we had our final presentation for the 2nd project. This is week 5 and the last 2 weeks (10/26–11/09) have been crazy busy including weekends. Want to know how crazy busy? read through
We get 2 weeks for each project and for this project we also worked on branding and high-fidelity prototype, so it was intense, and I had to put a lot of extra hours after the class and over the weekends. I am really enjoying the format of learning in the morning and applying the learnings in the afternoon by practicing it. In the first week of project 2, we performed research and the second week was designing and testing.
For Project 2 we are designing an eCommerce website. On the first day of this project, we were asked to find a local business that has an online website but desperately needs revamp. I picked ‘Circle Furniture’ which is based in Massachusetts and their website wasn’t that bad but definitely needed work to improve usability. On the same day, we learned about LEMERS in the class and performed a Heuristic evaluation on our client’s website and the website of potential competitors from the US. I found 18 violations on my client’s website and the severity rating was 4. We discussed our findings and thoughts in our Zoom Breakout room (aka Pod).
A pod is a small study group of 4–5 classmates that instructors create. The instructors also hop in and check on us in between. Though it’s online and remote it really feels like we are sitting in a class together.
On day 2, we went deeper into company and business research by doing competitive and comparative analysis for our client. I used the Task Analysis and Feature Inventory technique to study Furniture businesses — Gardner White, Apt 2B, IKEA, Etsy, Feather Furniture, Cort Furniture.
We started our day 3 with a career coaching session conducted by Ruby. In the second part of the morning, we started with Information Architecture sessions conducted by Jarrett. It was interesting to see the different ways you structure the information on your website. When you have information to organize you also need to group them and sort them, for which the Card Sorting technique comes to your rescue. We used the Optimal Workshop tool to conduct research. As I mentioned in my last journal the best part of this cohort is you get participants for your study easily from your class. I traded 4 card sorting sessions with my classmates and managed to get 4 participants from my friend circle.
Thursday, we started by learning how we use our Card Sorting results and design the navigation for our site. We learned about different navigation types and applied that to our project work. I scrapped the navigation from Circle Furniture’s website and worked on a site plan. I also worked on User Flow to design a happy path for my user. From the Card Sorting results, I decided to categorize the product range based on their function instead of ‘by room’ — Living Room, Bedroom, Kitchen, etc.
It wasn’t really a Friyay!
But I love the compliments session on Friday where one of your secret classmates compliments you on your work and it's read by one of our instructors Abbie or Phil during the class. It’s a great exercise and practicing gratefulness really keeps me motivated. 🍟
I anticipated that I would have to get my paper sketches and paper prototype testing was done over the weekend in order to start working on Grayscale the following week. Because it’s a website I struggled getting started with sketching. When I see back, I was arguing with the size of the screen and what all I can put on it. I used my old magic trick to find a solution — went for a late evening walk around Charles River near my house. Oh boy! The sunset and the big moon gave me chills. And it did help me to draw a plan for my paper sketches.
I spent the Saturday on paper sketches and putting those sketches in the Marvel app. I asked my 3 friends to help me with the testing on Sunday. I woke up on Sunday feeling great and after I had breakfast, don’t know why but I just thought of playing with my paper prototype, and it was a mess. The JPEGs on my prototype were blown up and were not fitting my browser at a 100% aspect ratio. So, I went back and resized the images on the artboard and that opened more problems for me coz I lost the hotspots on each screen. lol! It was a good learning experience.
Tip: Working on Marvel App — Always first resize your artboards and images before getting prototyping.
I completed the user testing for my paper prototype and got some great insights. Shout out to my friends.
The second week our instructors took us to the land of visual treat and great insights on Visual Designing, Typography, Color Theory. This helped me in learning how to flip crap using the CRAP Technique (Contrast Repetition Alignment Proximity).
I finished my Grayscale using Adobe XD on Tuesday and scheduled 3 User Interviews of 15 mins each on Wednesday. I went back to my Adobe XD project and added 2 artboards to create a mood board and Typography and Colors that I will use for the Circle Furniture Website.
I know I have been talking a lot about this project and you don’t see any work because the case study for this project is in the works. 🚴
Using the quantitative and qualitative data from the user interviews I implemented the changes directly on my High-Fidelity prototype as I did not have enough time for further iterations and testing.
Thursday and Friday, we learned about Design Systems, Pattern Libraries, Responsive Designs, and Writing Reports for your project. We saw some really bad, funky, and cool examples of websites on the internet. (I will share those in one of my posts soon). This gave me a perspective to put together the Visual elements and creating a guideline book that I further applied on my project work and created standards for Typography, Use of Colors, and designed Components/Symbols.
The best part of Fridays in the class is the ‘Compliments Session’! 🍩
I ended the Friday by working on a Usability Report for my Grayscale testing which is one of the deliverables for this project.
Over the weekend I worked on the High-Fidelity design and added interactions to my prototype. Sunday evening I completed the presentation and practiced it twice as we only had 8 minutes to present so I wanted to be precise with how I will be using my time and engaging the audience.
I gave a kick-ass presentation <and dropped the 🎤> on Monday and I got some rave reviews from my classmates. That sense of achievement after all the hard work for 2 weeks cannot be described in words.😍
Update 03/05/2021 — Link to this case study
Thank you so much for reading this entry and being part of my UX journey. It means a lot to me. See you in 2 weeks! 😺
