Learning Experience
Over Fall 2019 PROtect reached out to Miami University for research assistance on their personal safety application. Me and 4 other designers were chosen for this assignment and worked along with PROtect to create a whole new user interface. Wireframing, prototyping, A/B testing, and usability testing, were the main steps in this process.
My Roles
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Team Lead: Led a team of four other designers, through research, design & usability testing
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Lead UX Designer: One of two primary designers on the team, when developing the user interface
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UX Researcher: Worked with four of my peers to conduct in-depth interviews, A/B Testing & eye tracking tests
Constraints
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Researching & designing for two diverse target markets (Mothers & Sorority Girls)
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Limited access to interviewees
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Narrowing the brand guidelines
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Design spanning more than one country & culture
Discoveries & Insights
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All Interviewees (10/10) in our target Market, used some sort of tracking app or another tracking method
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Among the interviewees we found similarities in what activities women had trusted ones tracking them in, this included, Uber rides, mall trips, dates & night time walks.
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Users want to share their location and see where others are
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Mandatory things like tutorials need to be quick
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Proper phrasing is important to the right understanding
Brand Guidelines
The first task we were given was to talk with the CEO of PROtect and get a better understanding of the app. After this meeting we took to the current app and studied the colors, fonts, and verbiage that the app used. We learned how serious of a tone the app needed to have, as well as the very feminine colorway that the app uses.
In-Depth Interviews
After discussion with my group and our professor, we decided that conducting interviews with our target demographics on what they think of current safety in the world would be very effective in learning how to design our app. Our target demographic being sorority girls and moms (30s-50s) we had to go out and find people to conduct these interviews with. You can find the link to our sorority findings here, and findings with moms here.
Personas
After our in-depth interviews with our target demographics, we decided to come up with some personas that would be who we are designing this app around. We wanted our personas to have the desires of our app, while also seeming to be a real person as well. The design of the personas were done to keep the aesthetic of the app and to make it presentable. What we learned from doing these personas is that the app needs to be easy to learn, efficient, able to share location, easy to communicate, and most importantly make them feel safe.
A/B Testing
It was finally time to start creating our first iterations of wireframes and do some A/B testing. All 5 of us in our group created our own versions of wireframes and we took those designs and reduced them down to two favorites of each screen. At this point we were not as worried about consistency of screens due to how early in the project it was. These tests were mostly done to find preferences of design, color, font, verbiage, and to seek out any confusions of the apps UX design as well. The link to our findings deck can be found here.
After the initial A/B testing there was a long period of time where we had to design many more screens and update the old ones as well. After this designing period and coming to a consensus about what our app is to look like our professor suggested we try paper usability testing. This test was more for getting information on how the UX preforms and not as much the design. We did include some questions about design but that was not the main focus of the test. We tested several sorority girls for this test due to that being our demographic and got great results back that influenced even more design changes. Our results can be found here.
Eye-tracking Usability Test
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Eye Tracking Tasks assigned to users during a usability test
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The first 5 seconds after participants came to the home screen for the first time while the tutorial was on the screen.
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The first 3 seconds after users were asked to create an event for a date that they were going on.
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The first 5 seconds after users were asked to create a quick event because they were going in an Uber from the airport
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The first 5 seconds after users were told they have a new phone number and were asked to go and change it in their profile.
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The first 5 seconds after users were asked to look at their friends upcoming events (we wanted them to go to the notifications pull down).
