I was planning to learn UX design for such a long time and finally here is my first UX design project: Lakshya, an app which allows an user to manage their time easily by creating your goals and breaking them down into small tasks. UX design always interested me and being a front-end developer I think UX design skill will definitely come in handy.
I am really thankful for the Springboard for their wonderful course which has amazing curricullum and a very supportive mentorship programme.
My mentor during my journey was André Martin to whom I can’t thank enough. He constantly supported me to climb the steep learning curve of UX design.
It is the begining of 2018 and during this time of the year everyone looks for ways and methods to achieve their resolution. So this project is my approach on how I would like to solve the problem of time management.
One thing me and my friends struggle a lot is with time management. We all have personal goals we want to achieve but fail to do so because we fail to manage and prioritize our personal time.
My assumption was that mainly everyone struggles in time management due to following reasons
Using these assumptions as my reference I set out to solve this problem. To gain a better understanding about the problem, I started interviewing them which I have outlined in next section.
I realised in the very begining of learning UX that users are always important during a product creation process. It is very important to seek constant user’s feedback and understand their point of view at every stage.
I interviewed 4 candidates face-2-face and 15 using the survey questions.
Please find the results of survey here
Following were the insights from the user-interview process:
Overall interview process was a fun and unique learning experience. It was a good starting point for my journey of building a product. It also helped me in creating user-stories and features for my product.
I also created two personas and empathy-maps out of my user-surveys.
I used these personas as my compass every time I ponder about the feature and feel of the product.
Why two personas?
I wanted the app to be easy-to-use and understand by everybody. So I created two personas which reflected techies(Jim) and non-techie(Janet).
Janet feels overwhelmed by technology but she has goals to achieve in her life whereas Jim eats and breaths technology and wants to achieve more in his life.
Since I am also a front-end developer I understand the importance of a well written user-stories and feature mapping. I created these user stories keeping in mind the personas I mentioned above. I also thought about some features that I would love to see in the future releases of my product
See complete list of user-stories here
One thing was very clear to me since the start of the process, I wanted to design my entire product keeping the user in driver’s seat. So, again I went back to user’s to find out, how they would like to struture the app on the basis of user-stories that I created. To find this out I used ard-sorting technique.
Card-sorting technique helped identify number of screens should I have in my app and what each screen should do.
I asked 4 users to perform card-sorting technique for my app and discovered that majority of them wanted to see features divided among these screens-
I had a general idea about the screens that I should have in my product, but after card-sorting I was confident about it. So now it was time to create an user-flow which involves defining user’s journey in the product. User-flow laid groundwork for the next crucial step which was wireframing. I was now able to visualize how app was taking the shape and coming to life.
I was missing my users again, and wanted to seek their feedback on the
wireframes. But I also wanted to perform usability-testing on these wireframes. So I quickly mocked the pen-paper wireframes to proto.io. I added interactions among the screens as these will give me a better sense of understanding of how users will interact with the product.
I was so happy about my decision to seek user’s feedback of the wirframes and user-flows. The insights that I gained during 3 interviews that I had were so helpful. The usability teting helped me in two ways -
Following were the general questions that I asked during the interviews
Following were the changes that I amended after usability-testing —
I decided to use green color for primary actions to indicate positivity and progress
I chose green color as it gives feeling of progress and positivity. I have chosen red color to show urgency of goals.
Constantly seeking feedback from the users at every step gave me immense confidence about the design of the product. I was less doubtful whether users would like the app or not because I knew users had majorly contributed in the structuring of this product. I was also surprised how I created the design which were completely different from what I had in mind initially. This was mainly due to using the users as a compass and not allowing my biases to come in the way.
I want to work more and improve on this idea after hearing feedback from kind world of internet ;)
I will definitely try to convert into a real world app as I really want to help my everyone and myself to get things done and achieve goals.
Got any feedback I would love to hear that.
Want to see more of my work head to www.jitenagarwal.com