Nicolas Manaud

Day 28. Style tiles were made and we discovered Sketch was better than Photoshop for UI design (it’s all about the vectors!).

Having made the second round of changes to our digital wireframe design, we began the next round of user testing. This time we took our clickable/ tappable prototype to the Playstation gaming bar in Soho and tested it in context with our target user. This was very useful and the feedback we got was insightful.

The changes that we noted were mainly focused on use of iconography, language used in the Call To Action buttons and the positioning of some of the elements.

Once we had noted the changes from this round of testing, we began work on the presentation of our project, which was due tomorrow. 

We started off by setting the structure of the presentation. The structure was going to be centred around the story of our two primary personas and how we found them, how we identified their needs and frustrations and how we propose to help them.

Once we had decided on the structure, we began work on the graphic design for the presentation and the script, again this was to help us to build up an engaging and thought-provoking narrative.

Each of our group was allocated a part of the presentation to present, we were eager to demonstrate that our team was aware of every aspect of the project, so we made sure that this was reflected in the way we collaborated in the presenting of it.

With a few hours of practising the presentation together to ensure accuracy and timing, we were ready for the big day.

WEEK 5, DAY 22

PROJECT #3

Today A-Team was working on creating the digital prototype. We implemented the changes we’ve  made on the sketches based on the feedback from the testing yesterday. Nico worked on creating a style sheet and a templateon Sketch, while we were refining the paper prototype. Then each of us worked on specific screens using the template and the agreed styles. Once each of us was done with the screens we combined them. However, instead of making a low-fidelity digital prototype we went straight into a high-fidelity prototype (mockups), which took too long and we didn’t have time to create a clickable prototype on Marvel, and so we couldn’t do a round of testing today. Learning from experience!

As a team we decided to dedicate the evening to networking, which all of us find very important. I headed to ‘Ladies that UX’ and the guys went to ‘UX Crunch’ meetup.

The research fase for our Twitch project is wrapped up, we’ve spend the weekend creating a paper prototype and it’s time to test it.

After a morning lecture on the Principles of Interface Design, we’ve test the prototype on four subjects, recorded in video each session and took notes of the feedback. We already have a ton of changes planned for the next version.

PROJECT #3

WEEK 4, DAY 17

Today was a very busy day for A-TEAM (as always I guess) and we got a lot done, so the team spirit was up. I think that partly the reason for keeping up with the plan is that we are becoming better at separating tasks rather than working on everything together, which could be very time consuming. 

We managed to complete most things we’ve got planned for today. Ollie and I (Sia) finished the survey, we tested if it works alright and are now starting to distribute it, while Nico and Elias were working on interviewing users and on task analysis. As a team we managed to interview 4 people so far, we started working on the user flows already, and touched on the sitemap briefly. 

Regarding the survey, we are doing A/B testing with two images when sharing on social media, so we can see which one is being more clicked and more shared. We can then continue to share the more successful one in order to get more responses. We’ve created a list with all the places we want to share the survey and we all got cracking with competing this list. 

We are also putting a lot of effort to document files, pictures, diagrams, concept maps well so we are all able to access them easily when needed; as well as constantly update all the communication channels we’ve agreed on at the beginning (trello, slack, google drive, tumblr, pinterest), so all team members are up to date with what the others are doing. 

As of the evening, Ollie and Elias are visiting a gaming shop tonight and a gaming bar, so they can meet and talk to gamers. They will also have the chance to share the survey with more people. Nico and I (Sia) are working from home on contextual inquiry & interview questions, user journeys and sharing the survey across channels online.

We are still in the first week of the two week sprint, which is the discovery stage. So we are trying to find out as much as possible about our users and competitors before starting the design stage.

A-TEAM is looking forward to tomorrow when we will be working on site maps, user flows, personas & scenarios, revisiting the project summary and analysing survey responses.

Loving the project. Loving the team. WHOOP WHOOP! 

Before jumping into the next project, we’ve revisited Product Planning, digging deeper into waterfall and agile frameworks, and adding two new ones: Wagile and Scrummerfall.

We’ve also had lectures on how to create a project summary and recruit research participants.

PROJECT 3

As in Project 2, the challenge is to design a new feature for an existing service in a 2 week sprint, but this time we are working in teams and we don’t have the personas already defined. My teammates are Sia, Nicola and Ollie. 

Our client is Twitch and the objective is to improve the way the platform handles game walkthroughs.

We’ve kicked off our work analysing the brief, creating concept maps to help us identify competitors and the user profiles. Once we had that, we started the competitive analysis, but we quickly realised that having the whole team working on one task is not efficient, so we distributed the rest of the day’s work. At the moment we are working on surveys for the user research, task analysis, business analysis and researching where to find users with profiles that match the project requirements.