Working on a single project over the course of the semester is one of my favorite ways to implement what I’ve learned and critique how much further I’d like my skills to come. In my user experience design class, we had the opportunity to design the user interface of an app from the ground up. We began by brainstorming general ideas for projects that we were passionate enough to work on for a full semester, starting with problems that plagued our own lives. I decided that I’d love to work on building the UI for an app that focused on traveling and either linguistics or storytelling.
From here, we moved to our first round of user interviews. I spoke with six people that met the following requirements:
- Traveled in the last five years for leisure
- Age: 18-80
- Traveler has played an active role in directing or planning their trip
After some intensive note taking, organizing, and re-writing, I found a few common themes in the information I gathered in my initial user-interview.
You can see the collection of my notes and ideation here, along with the questions I asked. From the interviews, I generated five “how might we” statements:
- How might we encourage locals to an area to tell their stories to tourists?
- How might we make a story-telling experience feel authentic to tourists?
- How might we make a podcast of telling a local history/folktale feel like an adventure?
- How might we make a folktale or history story feel like a lower price but equally high quality option compared to a guide?
- How might we use storytelling, recording, and technology to help people recall their adventures?
Using the “how might we’s” above, I created the problem statement for my project. It is as follows: Travelers need a way to explore and remember local stories because these stories can be difficult to find and easily forgotten over currently existing media.
Once I had established a problem statement, I used storyboards to create a few user personas and better understand how and when a person might be using my app. Two of my storyboards are below (forgive the fact that all of my people look like little potatoes. I’m not the best pen and paper artist.)
Now that I had a good idea of the purpose of my app and the problem that I was trying to solve, I started by making rudimentary wireframes.
We did a small round of user testing with the wireframes, then moved on to higher fidelity prototypes. At this point, I started to pin down the brand image and design that I wanted for the app. I designed the logo, picked color schemes and fonts in line with the message that I wanted to send, and began picking example images.
I built a prototype in InDesign (which you can walk through, here), which I used in a final round of user tests. I got some good feedback in these tests, namely that the users couldn’t identify the purpose of the app from the first screen, the text on the story selection “cards” (visible bottom right) was too small and the cards themselves were too large. After a final round of changes, I had my “finished” user experience project. We produced a short video about the projects, walking through our process and demonstrating our final products, which you can view below.
Ally's Process Blog 