For the Interaction Design project, our group were given the task of creating a digital content creation and curation tool for a certain community. We went through the entire cycle of user research, conceptual design, detailed design and evaluation.
(Click images to enlarge for more detail)
User Research
For this process, after choosing our community through brainstorming (Students part of Sustainable City), we observed their behaviour and activities at several events that were put on as part of Sustainable City Week and then conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews. After this we sent out a questionnaire (below) in order to gather key information such as what elements of sustainability students find most important, what activities they would like to be offered to them and how they communicate with one another. Analyzing this user research, we generated opportunities and features for our application to offer to students.
We also produced personas (below) from the user research in order to illustrate a typical possible user of our application.
Both existing (below) and future user journeys were created to show the current problems and the possible solutions to them using our application.
Conceptual Design
During this phase, we began an iterative process of drafting designs (below), sharing them, evaluating them and amending them. This meant every group member could explore their ideas and contribute to the final design. We finalized that our app would have four main sections – profile, feed, video tutorial suite and events. We made sure that our user research continually fed into our designs and we wanted to satisfy the community needs.
Detailed Design
Our group created concrete wireframes for each vital section using Balsamiq. Here, we were able to see what functionality would be possible and if the sections are usable and clear for users. This was also an iterative process and we evaluated other designs with each other during this process.
Evaluation
The final process of our coursework was vital – we formulated evaluation questions for users to complete. Each group member tested our designs with different people and gathered feedback about aspects such as whether icons and wordings were clear and if users knew what they could do on each wireframe. We fed some of this evaluation back into our designs but also reported it in our final report to show what we could improve and progress with in the future.
Our group also created a poster to illustrate the main functions and benefits of our app to our chosen community.
