Ironhack WEEK 1: 1st Project successfully delivered!
Yes, we made it (even if for a moment we thought was impossible)!
This week was challenging since “DAY1″ and didn’t stop to be during the rest of the days. The biggest challenge we faced was working in Teams with the goal of designing a single-function “utility” app based on open-ended generative research, however, thanks to the amazing teaching skills of our Prof. Nevan Scott and the great support of our TA Sabrina Arcella, everything went smoothly and we enjoyed every step of the process.
I worked in Team with Gabri and Rocio, and we decided to chose as topic “Grocery Budget”.
Based on this starting point, we begun the process performing some User Research. This phase has been structured in different phases:
1_conducting users interviews: addressing prompt questions to 6 users helped us gathering more information on how defining the behaviour of the users and understanding their approach in regards the chosen topic.
2_creation of affinity diagram: writing down all the findings on virtual post-its (using miro) and then grouping them in clusters helped us to define which were the main pain points about our topic: * spending awareness * reducing/controlling the spendings.
3_sketching ideas using the crazy 8 method: having the pain points in mind and with the idea of trying resolving them, we started sketching possible “app screens” on how this app could have been, or which feature could have contained.
After this long “diverging phase”, we grouped ideas, set ourselves in a “converging mode” and finally got to the conclusion of designing an app where you can track grocery expenses, monthly or weekly, with the option to set a limit budget where the goal is saving money.
The next phase was transforming the ideas, prototyping a flow in wireframes mid-fidelity using Figma. This was the stage were we felt a bit stuck as we didn’t properly know how to transform an idea into something more consistent and meaningful, but we managed! We develop a flow starting from setting a monthly budget, scanning a Supermarket receipt and transforming it into data uploaded into the system and updating the budget spent until that moment.
After defining our prototype, we performed Usability tests with 4 participants to see if our product was running correctly or needed some improvement based on real feedbacks. So we did, and i can tell this iteration was fundamental for us to bring crucial adjustments in our prototype.
On Friday Morning (26 March 2021) we had to deliver a 10 minutes presentation and my Team and I were very impressed by the time management we were able to maintain in order to present the deliveries. We also received constructive feedbacks that surely will push us to do better next time.
Overall feedback: I am exhausted, but extremely happy and proud of what i could achieve in only one Ironhack week!
