Entrepreneur | Innovation | Digital | UX/UI Design

This has been a tough week for me. We started a new individual project consisting in building a B2B SaaS Web app. I can’t lie, I was really scared because of 2 main reasons:

- Time of the project is shorter for since I’m Heading to Bcn next week

- I didn’t Know how to start the project.

So, on Sunday, I just decided to make a plan a go for it. Once I started my user research things started to get better and clearer. And well, the big win for this week is that I managed to keep up with my plan and daily tasks. Maybe not as I imagined them but quite close :)

To me the key learning of this week is that: when you propose to do something, you can achieve it. Just make it realistic in terms of the time you’ll address to it and the outcome you are looking for. 

This week’s project consists on an individual challenge in which we have been asked to de develop a B2B SaaS platform in order to improve the work of employees at a company or get their work done in a more efficient way.

During the weekend, we read an article about a research process used and this what I learnt:

One of the best research practices done in UX, especially during the pandemic, is remote Contextual Inquiries used “to fill the research gap between data collected during remote usability testing and on-site contextual inquiries with end users.” By capturing the computer screen of a person working with their version of the software on their own computer. Yet, without giving any instructions or tasks, while a user is interacting with a software and only observing how he interacts with it, unlike other research methods such as Usability Testing where the user is asked to do specific tasks. This technique provides an opportunity to view exactly what our end users see – their version of the software, customizations, feature access, personalizations, and the actions they actually perform to accomplish their goals. Thus, been really helpful to distinguish different problems that the user could deal with on parts that we wouldn’t imagine and so, helping to see if there are unnecessary features or features that could be added to improve the user experience.

3 main steps are needed for this process:

Identify the users: ideally 6 people

Conduct visits: where the idea is to observe the user's behaviour with the software

Analyze data in order to see what are the user needs to be improved within the software

Beginning of the week: Excitement about new project and new group

During Workshops: Very hungry since we worked on the redesign of a restaurant’s website

A little messy (it was the team’s word of the week):

Friday: Proud and happy about the project’s outcome

We wanted to celebrate it, but new project kicked off:

Yes, as you read it, one month has already passed. It has been a month plenty of new challenges, moments of stress and happiness.

This week consisted on an individual project where we had to design a self paced E-learning platform. The goal was to come up with a Hi-Fi Prototype and a real business model. And yes, believe me when I say it has been the most intense week we’ve had since we started the project… I think I passed on average 10 hours per day on my computer 😳 (so I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little scare of how the following 5 weeks will look like).

I started this project as usual with a research phase where I looked into 3 main things: the e-learning market, competitors and potential users. The ideation phase was the most challenging for me in terms of the Figma work. Since it was the first time for me creating a Hi-Fi Prototype, I had to think in tiny (not so tiny) details like the color palette, icons, font type, CRAP, etc... which actually took me long hours of work to define. But well, after 5 long days I can say I’m really proud with the outcome of my project :) you can have a look at it here.

One of my main takeaways this week I think was the support of my classmates (without them, I think I would have gone crazy 🤪). We had daily meetings where we said what we were doing and what we were planning to do next which helped a lot to have better overview of my week roadmap. And we even created some of the work in common (the survey).

For my next week’s project consisting on building an E-Learning Platform, I’m going to choose Alicia as my main proto-persona: “Alicia originally studied fashion which is how she wound up at Mango. As she’s learned more about the business, she’s become increasingly interested in moving onto the marketing team. She studied a bit of marketing at university, but hasn’t used it, and her manager told her she would need to improve her skills with digital marketing tools like Google Analytics and other platforms in order to be considered for a new role at Mango.”

She is an iOS user and her goal is to learn about Digital marketing and growth hacking. So, for this user I am going to show you the Native iOS interface guidelines that I’m going to have in mind for my prototype:

Tab Nav Bar (at the bottom): enabling users to understand their current location at a glance and allowing rapid switching between features. In the Apple Human Interface Guidelines there’s no standard navigation control that’s similar to the drawer navigation menu in Android. Instead, Apple’s guidelines recommended putting global navigation in a tab bar. The tab bar appears at the bottom of the app screen.

2. Call to Action Button: It’s a good way to prioritize the most important action you want users to take (important note: Not every screen should have one, simply because not every screen has an action of such importance).

3. Typography: San Francisco is the system typeface in iOS. Roboto is the standard typeface in Android.

4. Moving between states / screens: Moving backward and forward between screens is a common action users take on apps. On Android there is a universal nav bar at the bottom. However, since there is no universal back button on iOS, every app screen needs to have a button on the top left corner.

5. Button styles: There are two styles of buttons in the Material Design Guidelines — flat and raised. These buttons are used in different situations. The text on buttons in Material Design is usually all uppercase. Sometimes we find uppercase button text in native iOS apps too, but most often we find title case.

Today I’ve got to watch this interesting Apple Video showing the different steps in order to design an app. It was a very insightful video that actually gave me realistic knowledge and good examples of the things that I’m currently doing at Ironhack. During the video, they walked us through these different phases of design by giving a realistic example of designing a food delivery app. 

Here I would like to highlight, in my opinion, the most important things:

Good design is not easy, it seems obvious but which makes it difficult are the questions you answer in order to deliver it: Who?, What?, Why?, How? and When?

So first, how do you define your app? In order to have an idea of what your solution will look like it is important that you identify and collect your audience but also your own app goals. This is done by clearly understanding for WHO you are designing it for and What are their NEEDS. Here, it is essential that to understand that “You are not the user. You might be a user of your app, but if you design for yourself, you risk building in preconceptions and biases about the user experience that might be completely wrong for everyone else. Designing for yourself distracts you from what matters most to everyone else.”. But the opposite is also true, your users are not everyone. Instead you just need to understand the characteristic of the people that would use your app.

Additionally, as I mentioned before, it is also important tho to describe the experiences YOU want your users to have as in how you would like your app to be seen and felt by your audience.

One third of the Bootcamp is already over, can you believe it? 

This week’s project was about implementing a new feature into an existing app. I worked in the team in charge of adding a Karaoke 🎤 feature to Spotify 🎶 , which was super fun! At the beginning we were having some doubts about how we were going to add it, which functionalities it would have…. But after some user-research, benchmarking and brainstorming, we came up with a very cool and smooth solution. 

One of the things that I really enjoyed learning this week were animations and overlays which help to build a more interactive prototype.

I think that the article Learning to Code summarizes everything around design very well: “Learning to design is learning to see”. As it explains, every person in this world according to their professions and their life experiences see things differently. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”. Meaning that people will have a better understanding and a more detailed look with the things they are familiar with or have more knowledge about. 

During this week we worked on our first individual project, consisting on creating a Habit Tracking App. At the beginning I was struggling on the selection of my topic but decided to go for Water Drinking Habits. For this project we added some new tools like Surveys permitting to bring more quantitative data to the project, we also built Problem Statements allowing to define better your problem and User-Personas enabling you to create a “real” user for who you are creating the solution. We also had our first Crits session, which gave room for improvements and was super useful!

We had our first round of Crits this week while working on individual projects about creating a Habit Tracking app. This Crits session consists on really short presentations of the projects followed by a round of first impressions, feedback (addressed as neutral questions in order to avoid inappropriate or rough opinions) and suggestions to improve. But also, you are able to ask some questions about things you are unsure regarding your own project giving you room to get some ideas and opinions about it. 

1st week of the Bootcamp is already over!! I feel that I made so many things but at the same time it passed so fast! 

I really enjoyed the project of this week that was based on creating an app going from scratch to a mid-fi solution. Since my future plans are to build my own company and during this last months I have been developing an app in Bolivia the process and methods we learnt including User interviews, Usability Testing and Prototyping  are really useful to apply on my own projects.

I am proud of the outcomes we had in our team and I’m very excited for the upcoming weeks 🤩

Having lived in four different countries and travelled a lot around the world, when people ask me where I’m from, it’s never a one-line answer. I like to think that this accurately reflects who I am as a person: multi-dimensional, highly-adaptable, and difficult to describe in one sentence.