UXtopia

Day 49 

Here we are. The final day of the User Experience Design Immersive course, number 11 in London. I couldn't even picture this day when I started writing this journal. 

We started by drawing our 10 weeks summarised into a single sketch - I decided to pay tribute to the memes that kept our cohort entertained during the course, courtesy of Arnie. 

The rest was spent being debriefed by the instructors, including what to expect going forward and the action we can take beyond the course - job related stuff. Because of the Easter bank holiday in England, the expected 50 days has been compressed into 49 days. The long weekend ahead certainly feels well deserved. 

Day 48

What a day. The team and I spent the first half rehearsing to ensure we were good to go for the presentation at 14:00. In between, we watched other teams perform to an excellent standard - they really delivered their pitches to a professional and theatrical level, and as us going last of all the teams, we really felt the pressure.

And when the time came, we delivered.

The nerves gradually dissipated as we progressed into the slides, and of course the passion of delivering the project to the client surfaced. In the end, the culmination of the two weeks was a passion (in the truest sense with pains endured) so we were all keen to bring it across. We performed a role play to complement the slides and ensure the prototype was demo’d in a potentially real life scenario.

And it was well received.

The client loved it. The instructors praised it. There was an incredible feeling at the end of 15 minutes standing up in front of a crowd consisting of 20 students, instructors and clients.

We discussed deliverables (basically access to our prototype and when to send the specifications document filling in the technical details not covered in the presentation) with the client straight after. The rest of the day was celebrating the end of a magnificent journey in learning UX. With drinks. And a lot of fun.

Day 47

Continued refinement of the presentation was the order of the day. These extra buffer days have given us decent leeway to really sharpen our message for the client.

We let down our shields today between teams (in a good way) which allowed us to assess each other’s presentation quality and highlight any glaring issues between us. It’s good to get feedback from outside of a project team and inter-team interaction will likely be a regular theme in the professional world (and if not, it should be) because it was certainly beneficial today.

Tomorrow is the client presentation. Somehow I’m not anxious, perhaps because it has been a solid two weeks of hard graft where we’ve prided ourselves on the quality of the proposal. I’ll sign off now with mixed feelings knowing tomorrow is not only the end of the project but also the end of the formal learning process at General Assembly.

Day 46

Our first rehearsal took place today in front of instructors to test the conviction of our story. There was room for improvement, both in the vocal aspect and also the visual support material.

A quick addendum to week 9: we did indeed meet over the weekend and made sure the script to our presentation flowed. We also designated sections for speaking to ensure the message feels dynamic with different speakers rotating regularly. 

Day 45

Today was the marker for our two week design sprint ending for our real life client project. It’s incredible how fast time moves on this course - the intensity ensures there’s no time to count the seconds (...except when time-boxing/Pomodoro-ing!). 

The high-fidelity mockup was swiftly put together in Marvel this morning. We concluded our final round of user testing, not implementing the changes but instead providing guidance for the specifications document which will be given to the client upon conclusion of the project. In it will be detailed the methods we undertook to reach the latest iteration of the design and recommendations should the client wish to develop upon the designs in future sprints. 

Team preparation for the final presentation was underway today. We’ve decided to follow a story format upon the instructors’ collective recommendation to ensure the idea is sold to the client in an empathetic manner. We’ll likely meet on the weekend to flesh out the script and develop the slides plus any extraneous choreography around the story.

Day 44

80% of usability issues are found within 3-5 testers. 

With feedback in mind from the lo-fi digital wireframes and time ticking away, we built our hi-fi mockup, implementing more detailed visual design elements. This involved replacing placeholders with mock content and adding colour to formulate a potential final look to the client’s application. 

Day 43

Today we implemented our low fidelity wireframes into a digital prototype, however, in the process we learned that prototyping platform Invision, despite being very well marketed, is too buggy and not as intuitive as hoped for. Going forward, we will make use of Marvel which really has a Marvel-lous interface.

Tester feedback of this second iteration suggested our card system of display was mostly understood, however there will be some key visual design overhauls which we’ll be acting upon as we move to high fidelity mockup. 

We also received a potentially paradigm-shifting phone call from our client in response to their meetings with the British governmental regulating body for financial services (FCA). Thankfully, there were no major adjustments needed from us in the UX design on this sprint, however had there been, we would have continued with our momentum to deliver a substantial proposal. Any changes would then be actioned in the next sprint. 

Finally, the team is currently divided into two parallel processes; two are working on the prototype along with testing, whilst the remaining team member prepares slides for the crucial client presentation next week - the culmination of our two week sprint. 

Day 42

We deployed the paper prototype in the field amongst users who would typically fit (close enough) to our core user persona, in this case, an experienced ~30 year old equity-crowdfunder called Gregory. He is looking to up his investment game by understanding which investments are the most worthy based on information available to him within the app experience.

With this specific UI, it was difficult to take advantage of the swiftness that the paper version provides purely because of the large number of small moving parts. Nevertheless, it was immediately clear to testers that this was a prototype and they had to use their imagination to fill the gaps for the final app concept, allowing them to focus on basic functionality issues that may not be picked up in higher fidelity wireframes.

Day 41

Day 40

A thoroughly varied day where the discovery stage closed and we heralded the beginning of the evaluative design stage. 

The design studio session with our client consisting of their chief officers was by far the highlight of the day. The purpose of this was to allow flows of design thoughts to surface from their minds, together with ours as UX designers, to create a merged idea of what the mobile app should look like. This was highly productive and gave the project team a massive boost towards the first iteration.

The rest of the day involved catching up with formal documentation in digital format and running through a tutorial with one of the teaching assistants on Axure, which after using Sketch and Omnigraffle, seems somewhat archaic in its interface. Axure is still useful however in portraying interactively coded elements that the other mockup apps fail to perform adequately. In addition, it still seems to be an industry standard therefore getting to grips with it was crucial.

We ended on beers to celebrate a successful week and to call in the much needed weekend. The quote from Albert Einstein written in our previous classroom was a poignant and comforting one.

Day 39

We made good progress today by starting with a midweek meeting with the client. The purpose of this was to update them with our latest progress and to have answered any questions we developed over the past three days. 

An open card sort with their CIO also provided a good indication of all the sections we needed for our app sitemap. Knowing the structure brought us a step closer to closing the discovery phase in preparation for the evaluative design stage.

Day 38

We gained a lot of insight from our user research and in the process managed to create an amalgamated task flow that consolidated the steps for a single persona. Based on this, we could conduct a detailed competitor analysis to see where gaps lay in the market (it turns out there are no direct competitors for Qrowded’s unique offering).

From the survey data we received, we were also able to carve out three key personas who would possibly use our app. I put these together in a sketched proto-persona to be developed as the survey response matured towards our deadline of the end of the week.

Day 37

After the brief became clear from our initial client meeting, today became all about user research. It’s important to understand how users currently go about the task of using equity-crowdfunding platforms so that we can cater the Qrowded app fully to their needs.

A pinup of our kanban board and research so far allowed us to explain the latest happenings with our project to the class. It really highlighted the importance of displaying things visually as we referred to it throughout our day to monitor and make progress. 

I also secured two user interviews with finance professionals at their places of work to see what the steps in their task flow consisted of. Unsurprisingly, Google played a prominent role throughout.

Day 36

And so begins the final project under the tutelage of General Assembly. Our team of 3 has received a brief from a startup called Qrowded looking to obtain users for their equity-crowdfunding rating app. 

We were briefed by the instructors as to how to appropriately conduct client relations in anticipation of our first meeting with them in the afternoon. We came up with questions to clarify their intent and also set their expectations for this two-week sprint from a UX perspective.

Day 35

Made great progress for a 4 day sprint of my portfolio site. The site is responsive at one breakpoint designed for medium-sized mobile viewing; I’ve made a comment in the HTML to create more for phablets and tablets. 

Tested constantly in Chrome and Firefox using inspector tools (a great help for any web dev).

Showcased the latest iteration in front of other students and course instructors with positive feedback; one person crucially saying it reflected my personality which was interesting. 

Day 34

Day of the JavaScript! Such a complicated topic in the space of a day was unlikely to yield results - it’s fair to say most of the class were overwhelmed by the switch from mark-up to more complex if-else statements.