Sergi Márquez Planas

Well, well, this week has been a clear reflection of one of the possibilities that the world of work holds. What happens when things don't go the way you want them to? It’s difficult to state that there is only one correct answer. What I can say out loud is that you need a lot of patience and a lot of mental intelligence to be able to deal with these kinds of situations. Otherwise, this will be hell and a riot.

Everything seemed perfect from the beginning. An incredibly attractive project, a client that provided a solution to any type of need that we had as a group, a fast and satisfactory project start ...

The real dilemma lies in, how much personal ego can we put into a project to not accept that as UX designers we have goals that have to be met?  Learn the basis and apply them. That’s our main goal but, at what price!

I studied design and become a designer to find out solutions. It's what I like and what entertains my restless mind. I wanted to open doors to my inner world when I started UX and, as much as we want to show that this project closes them, in reality it’s preparing us for what is going to happen in the real world. There's freedom, but for it to exist there must also be its antitheses. At the end of the day, everything must be put on a balance and judged in the most professional way possible. We should act as professionals UX designers and make a study base in user centered design to find solutions to an already proposed solution. I like challenges so, I accept this one, whatever the result and whatever time we have.

But hope is not lost. Don't be fooled by Ironhack's deilvery date. The project can continue if the doors remain open and, in this case, I have made sure that they are open to be able to do the project that I really have in my mind.

We have finally overcome the infamous onboarding project (successfully). It has been a hard journey both in terms of research and design but we have finally come to fruition. My project, Wenbo has been born and it is now on the road!

For the first time I had to work with a project scope I didn’t know about from the beginning. I had never worked in an onboarding process as such, so I was the one who had to set the limits and know to what extent I can develop an MVP. 

The research phase was extremely long and difficult. It is the first time in my life that I spend so much time developing a research phase and, I must admit that,  after completing the entire project, I understand how necessary it was. I would like to thank all my acquaintances who have allowed me to interview them in order to get the necessary information. I owe you a beer; I will not forget it!

Prototyping has been difficult and above all knowing the right moment to jump from mid-fi to hi-fi. I had to step back at a certain point to solve navigation problems, but it has been solved in a fairly efficient way. One of the most interesting parts of this project was understanding the thinking patterns of the people who did my desirability tests. I found it very interesting to see which parameters could influence their decisions and which ones could not. In the end, I was happy to see the results approaching my brand attributes choices, and if they didn't, I knew exactly why.

I’ve been waiting to get to week 6 since I knew I was going to do the english cohort. Oh yeah, the infamous 6th week. It is well known by all students that the hardest project out of all cohorts is the onboarding one. Not because it is not interesting, but because we’ve never experienced a project like that before. At least, not me!

How am I doing? From 1 to 10? Motivation: 7/10 Stress: 6/10 Blocked: 4,5/10 Frustrated: 2/10 Feeling that I won’t have enough time to do what I want to do: 11/10

DO NOT underestimate the time that the process of user research can take. I repeat to make it clear, DO-NOT-UN-DER-ES-TI-MA-TE-IT. It took like one week and I sometimes feel like i need more information to focalize my thoughts and my insights. 

Honestly, I’m surprised I’m enjoying the research part so much. It’s a shame you can’t rejoice at your findings...that would mean staying at the middle of the road and we all know what happens there. There’s always a truck driven by the demons in your head saying, YoU WoN’t HaVE enOuGh tImE. Oh the demons... 

Now I’m focused on the UI part and the layout. I wish the group crit could be on Tuesday, but I guess it won’t happen unless you (Nevan) are reading this and decide to be merciful with a poor student. But you aren’t...are you?

I found this article really interesting, but it can be quite technical sometimes so it took me a few read to understand it fully. After that, I decided to note the most important parts for me, to make a clear summary to start the next project with a solid foundation.

What is it?

Remote Contextual Inquiry captures the computer screen of a person working with their version of the software on their own computer. The user in question completes typical tasks through the website and talks aloud as he/she does so. RCI is particularly useful for examining end user behavior and software customizations.It allows us to identify the end user’s task flow and the features and functions that may already be available to the user, but are not being used. Is cost-effective while yielding rich contextual information about users’ behaviors within their desktop environment. 

It opens a direct dialog between those who create the software and those who use it, allowing developers and interested parties to observe user behavior and to ask and answer questions without having to leave the office. ( Interactions with supporting software also can be captured, including email clients, file folder systems, and data storage systems).

Effectiveness

It offers great opportunities, especially when:

A project requires feedback from regional or international users.

Project cost is an issue (& it still allows greater contextual information).

Preparation time is limited.

Participants have limited time. It can take place in as little as 30 minutes.

RCI accomplishment

Recognize fields that have been hidden or disabled. Getting to know if a field had been removed from a page or if it was unnecessary for their business process. 

Identify particular words and labels that are ambiguous or misleading. To discover if end users know (or not) what a word refers to. 

Identify customized functionality and features. To discover if end users may need printing capabilities, for example, and consultants may have custom-created the functionality to do so. In addition, new fields are sometimes added to store data that is customer-specific. 

Evaluate possible layout changes. Usability professionals can learn about which tasks are primary, which are secondary, and the UI elements that get in the way. The content and amount of default data that appears in a form can be captured, as well as the personalization that make the user more efficient. 

Obtain real-life baseline metrics. General time-on-task measures can be recorded and find the number of mouse clicks required to perform tasks.

Identify non-intuitive learnability issues. Participants can describe learnability issues and can comment on the level of training that they received.

To keep in mind

You need to understand the target markets for your product so that you can obtain representative data from appropriate market segments.

This technique applies to software that is already deployed to a customer base.(The pros and cons of this technique must be weighed against a more traditional usability method).

You must always ask and receive permission to record audio or video with your participants and let them know where the info is gonna go or where will be used at.

It is helpful for researchers to understand the functionality of the product.

This technique is not a full contextual inquiry, supplemental documentation could be gathered to further understand the environment (request that the user take a few pictures of her work area, desk, and surroundings).

Steps I will be following for the next project:

Do some very deep research process to choose the business I find interesting and suitable for an on-boarding web app.

Do an investigation of the different end users of the website.

Define the target market to later collect good data from that segment of the market.

Conduct very well thought interviews with the appropriate user to gather the richest amount of data possible.

Do some brainstorming to create some interviews.

Do an interview-call where I define some tasks for the end users to perform while they talk aloud explaining every action and thought. (After asking for permission to record the whole interview)

Analyse the data gathered from interviews and start a second brainstorming to generate some ideas.

After a long, long & long slumber I finally woke up to join (for the third third time) the UX/UI cohort, since Covid-19 seems too annoying to disappear or give us a break. Thank god the weather is at our side, right??!!....

For this week, and after a quick intro on Monday to getting to know each other, we decided to start the project. My team was my up of Carla and Janine and our first goal was to fins a local small e-commerce business or organization to propose a redesign. After the options, our final choice was to redesign the “Tennis Club Premià de Dalt” website and mobile version. 

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The first step we decided to do was to analyze the current website to find some usability problems (which we found a lot) and to define some structure inconsistencies. After that analysis we proceeded to carry out the card sorting to observe what the user's browsing perceptions were and, thus, be able to establish a correct navigation criteria for the future redesign of the website. After all the results obtained, we decided to plan a redesign with much simpler and more logical navigation. The next step was to carry out the tree tests through which the users looked for specific information in the new redesign and, thus, to be able to draw final conclusions on whether the process that had been carried out had been correct or whether there were still some changes to be carried out.

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The second step was to focus on the layout and find a new style for the website. For that we decided to create an style-tyle where we decided the approach we were gonna follow to do the redesign of the brand. The most important thing was to do a 180º change on the branding, keeping it simple and staying away from the coldness of the dark colors. Since the club offers a lot of activities, we decided to focus on some brand attributes reflecting that. The most important was to be Family-friendly, it was a must for us. After that we chose a color palette that resembled those attributes and focused our attention on a communicative minimalist design.

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After that we centered our attention on the mobile version to see how things will translate to that. We made some clear rearrangements in terms of typography sizes and images display, but the overall feedback we got was really good. We were happy to see that the Family Friendly attribute was translating well across platforms and screens. 

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The next part was centered on the desirability test to see the perceptions of the users and their emotional or attitudinal responses to our prototype's visual designs. Thankfully for us, Family friendly (18/72) was the most chosen attributes of them all, followed by Lively, Appealing and then Inviting and fun. 

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The last part was the coding part where we had to program our home page and the responsive version for mobile using HTML/CSS. This was not our area of expertise so we could use the help of 2 students from Web/Dev. Thanks to them, we finally managed to get a pretty close website coding design from we have envisioned with our design. 

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We work very hard for this project, even though we had to sacrifice some sleep hours. We learn how to trust each others’ process so we could divide and conquer all the challenges Nevan is throwing at us. BRING EM’ ON!

Thanks To Janine and Carla for the great teamwork and be willing to learn and receive graphic design tips. And also, thanks to Sergi and Marina for the great effort they put helping us to do some coding.

Graphic Designer and Art Director living in Barcelona.  I have always said that the minds of creative people are like a rocket. With the slightest encouragement, we take off and start the amazing process of creation something. I love bringing concepts to life through creative processes and, then, land them to start building projects and experiences. Being capable of making the ideas flow and transform them is just fascinating. Creativity allows us to find almost unlimited paths that lead us to the same destination.