#ixmd

"When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.” - Norman, 1988. 

The last week I've been working so hard, that I didn't even have time to write a blog. Or no, I did have time to write a blog. I just did not make time to write one. And I just did not know where to write about. The only thing I was doing was sketching. Thinking how the app should work. How the functions should be. I thought I didn't do anything special. But now I think of what I did, I asked user feedback all the time. About small things, about what the users want, how they think about things. But only in a small way: through a chat on facebook, face to face, sometimes even via a text. Every small decisions I was not sure about, I asked people. I checked other apps. I compared things. I thought about everything very careful. It is a great process to go through like this. Especially when you go to the next step: user testing. 

For the user test, I showed my sketches to users and asked them what they thought what kind of app it was. I did this, in order to check the concept. After this, I asked if they understood the screens and how they thought it works. What happened, everyone was enthusiastic, understood and liked the idea. Which is really nice to hear after so much work! There are some minor things I have to adjust now, but I did not really analyze the results yet, so that will come later. 

After defining the target group, I started to work in the personas. I basically want to write about that in order to keep in mind how I did it.

The year before I moved to Stockholm, I worked at Concept7. We also used personas in order to get to know our target group. While making these persona's, the MBTI-model was used. This MBTI-model is basically a model based on how people make decisions. In the short version of this model, there are four different types: people who make their decisions fast or slow, and people who make their decisions based on facts or feelings. So, there are people who make slow decisions, based on facts and slow decisions, based on feelings. At the same time, there are people who make fast decisions, based on facts and people who make fast decisions based on feelings.  

Since there are four different types, I decided to make four different persona's: one of all the types. Besides that, since I had to make 4 persona's, I decided to make to 2 local personas, and 2 tourist personas. From both of them, I made a girl and a boy. Since it is possible to meet people spontaneous or planned, on of them is also for a spontaneous meeting, while the other one is for a planned meeting. So, basiccaly, I ended up with these four different types: 

- A local girl, spontaneous meetings, MBTI spontaneous (fast decision, based on feelings), lives in Stockholm. - A local boy, planned meetings, MBTI methodical (slow decision, based on facts), lives in Amsterdam. - A tourist girl, planned meetings, MBTI competitive (fast decision, based on facts), lives in Vienna.  - A tourist boy, spontaneous meetings, MBTI humanistic (flow decision, based on feelings), lives in Barcelona. 

I choose for different cities, since the thing i want to design is an app for travelers. If I would only stick to people from Stockholm, I would tight myself up too much. 

Slowly but steady, everything gets more clear. I'm trying to write down all my thoughts in my notebook and keep up with all the decisions. But somehow, the things just went pretty natural right now - I didn't really had to make big decisions. 

So, just to make it clear, my idea right now is the following: 

[name of the app] is an app for both locals and tourists to explore now and uncommon/special places in a city (not area's yet, in order to keep it small. It will also only focus on Europe first). Both locals and tourists start with making a profile. After that, depending on being what you are, you start to look for buddies to explore the city with. - This can be spontaneous or planned. There are different categories to find buddies in, depending on what you want to do. 

The goal of the app is to make it possible for tourists and locals to get in touch with each other and explore the city. When you are a local, there is a change that you maybe don't see the beauty in the city anymore. Exploring new areas in it, or interesting museums or cafe's. 

After talking to my supervisor, I realized that I didn't think of how the users will exactly meet: planned or spontaneous? But as a traveler, you don't always know how your trip will go or you might want to plan everything. At the same time: the locals also have their daily live and might not always be looking for doing things with locals. They might want to come up with that spontaneous. This is why I decided that the users can choose if they want to plan the meeting or go for a spontaneous one. This will be a function of the app: picking which kind of meeting you want. 

Besides this, the users have to make a profile, in order to find the right matches. I don't exactly know how this will look like yet, but it will be more clear when I come further in the process and start sketching (which will be at the end of this week! :)). 

At the same time, I had to define my target groups for this app. Right now, I'm thinking of the users as young, adventurous, open minded people, who like to travel and use a smartphone. 

Slowly but steady I feel like I'm getting somewhere. I know the direction of what I want to design and how to start. So, the next step for me was to read two old master theses that students made in the same study, just a few years back :). 

Both of them designed an app that matches people based on their location, but both had different ideas behind it. Anyway, what I want to write about this, and mostly remember about this are some ideas that I could apply to my own thesis in 9 weeks: 

Look at related products and what extra features or functionalities my app has. - Describe these apps and look at differences

An idea for an thesis could be to evaluate my app of usability, user experience, design or something else. 

Look at previous research or projects/apps with almost the same project. 

These are just things that I should keep in mind for the upcoming weeks; or at least, remember it when I really have to start the thesis. 

The last few days I am really trying to find a subject for the graduation project. I wanted to let loose, to explore boundaries, to do something totally different. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. Maybe that is why it was (and is) so hard to find that one amazing idea where I want to settle and work with for the upcoming five months. 

After writing and thinking a lot, I found that there was one subject that I came back to every time: online relationships. Or how to build one. Or to connect with people. Something like that. So, the main idea I have right now is to conduct a research about how users online relate to something of someone. I can check previous research and already existing apps: what does the research say and how did these apps do it? Does it match? Have the apps what the research says is necessary? Or something like that. 

At the same time, I have to design something myself. Although I am not really sure what exactly, I want to do something with these relationships as well. But, for what kind of relationships I want to design is a complete different question. Romantic? Friendship? Or maybe even a customer relationship? The assignment is to design something rarely new or to redesign something that already exists. While I am writing this, I can not stop thinking of the app 'Party with a local'. The goal is that if you are new in a city, you can go party with someone who is a local there. However, the problem is that I really don't get how this app is supposed to work :). 

So, in the meantime it is a few months later and I haven't wrote any school related blogpost ever again. It is time to change that. It is time to graduate. 

My graduation exist out of two different parts: a design project and a dissertation. In the design project, there are different things I have to do. First of all, design something of course. But besides that, there has to be a plan on how to proceed, a written design report and an optional choice that describes the project (eg. a website, poster or video). When I am writing this, it seems like a lot. But the best way to keep in mind what I am doing (and more, what I have done) is for me to blog about it. So that is what I am going to do. I want to blog about different phases, about what I am doing, thinking and probably as well about my mistakes. I want to keep track of everything. Maybe I even want to blog about interesting things I find on the web. I don't know exactly yet, but I know that I want to blog very active :).