Lynes Case Study

Introduction and Overview

Lynes is a mobile journaling app that has a powerful rich text formatting feature and is completely cloud-based. It has other features like daily reminders to add entries and a chronological arrangement of notes. The goal was to get users to form the habit of journaling, if not every day, then more frequently than occasionally.

Identifying the problem

My team had specific goals for Lynes outlined and to achieve these goals or find out if they were plausible, user research was imperative.

Some of our high priority goals were:

• Automatic, customisable reminders to journal every day.

• Import function: a feature that allows users to add images, videos and other formats to their daily entries.

• A tag function that enables users to add different coloured tags to entries, possibly representing different moods/emotions.

With these goals in mind, we designed a survey and asked specific questions from which we discovered that most users added journal entries only occasionally, rather than daily but it was not for lack of want to. The majority of them enjoyed journaling but didn't do it often because they often didn't remember to.

The main challenge was to help users create the habit of journaling every day, with additional features as added incentives to get them to stay journaling.

Users and Audience

In order to be completely certain of our user base, research was imperative. However, due to the lockdown and limited movements because of the coronavirus, our research scope was limited. We opted for survey-based research, where specific questions were asked to gain insight into the mind of the users.

The results of this survey were fascinating, we found that most of our users are women between the ages of 15-25 and that they were eager to journal every day, but often forgot. Information gathered informed us that our users would be grateful for incentives to journal, something as simple as a reminder, or even a memory from a year before, an ability to add tags to journal entries and add pictures and videos. Essentially, our users wanted an app that cared that they put down their thoughts and emotions every day, and it was up to us to build such a product.

Personas

Roles and responsibilities

My team had three weeks to complete the building of the product. I hadn’t carried out user research prior to this, but even I knew that the time was pretty short to be able to create something rock solid. Another issue was that due to the fact that all our work was done virtually, there were problems with communication, inevitably.

As the team lead, it was my job to rally the other members of the team each day to ensure improvement in the building of Lynes. It was up to me to delegate, and also to lead by example. Originally a team of 7, two of the members were unavailable due to personal reasons and so we were short-handed.

Along with making sure everyone was on the same page and right track, I designed the survey questions, handled putting together the responses and all the team members each worked on user personas. After we wrote them, I found common threads in all the profiles and combined them to create the user personas that guided us through our building of the product. During the design process, I designed the onboarding screens, the logo and also assisted the members of my team in designing their respective screens.

Design Process

The process was very fascinating to me, and also insightful. It taught me practical lessons on the invaluable importance of user research, even before building a product.

Creating product goals for Lynes was the easy part, and I was prepared to have those goals toppled by whatever results our research would show.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen as our research showed that our goals were in line with the mind of our users, and we just needed additional incentives and features added. We chose the survey method because it was the fastest and easier way, especially for newbies and especially in a global pandemic that made face to face interviews impossible. I designed the questions and shared the survey via Google Forms.

We received over 60 responses and it met and surpassed our research goals because it revealed additional information that guided us in building a better product.

Using the carefully crafted user personas, each member of the team was to draw -by hand- low fidelity wireframes that would guide us in building the high-fidelity screens, which was where our design process would stop, being a fictional product. After this, a team member developed a site map, which would show the flow of the product and how the screens would flow in creating a prototype. We built a basic design system, with the colours we had researched thoroughly.

Low-fidelity Wireframes

Again, communication was a significant issue with my team members, but eventually, we all agreed on the flow of the low fidelity wireframes and it was time to design the high-fidelity types. This part was very exciting for me, seeing a design informed by user research come to life.

My team members and I agreed to each design the screens of the low-fidelity wireframes we had worked on and slowly, the design came to life.

Outcomes and Lessons

The home page opens up to a screen that asks the user,

'What are you grateful for today?'

This invites the user to start by adding an entry, right where the question sits.

At the bottom of the page, there is a tray that can be opened to reveal other features like the import and export function. The reason for this is that we wanted the user to stay focused on why they choose to open the app in the first place, which was to add a journal entry, with a nudge in the direction of gratitude, even though there are tags with which users can indicate anger, displeasure, fear and other emotions.

While creating the screens, a member of the team argued that the home page should contain a list of previous entries, to enable users to continue with a past entry but I maintained that the home page should open to an entirely new entry, where users can open their app and start journaling without having to find an icon to do that. The idea was to make it as easy and seamless as possible. They could access their previous entries via a hamburger menu at the top right corner of the screen or by searching via the search bar, with filters like the coloured tags and even date.

Many lessons were learnt in the building of Lynes, being completely new to user research, as a leader and as a communicator. Due to this particular project, I learnt the invaluable importance of user research and how it really is what influences and informs user interface design. It was surprising to discover how fascinating I found user research and I am excited to learn, practice and implement other forms of user research. building Lynes has helped me understand how to gain understanding into the thought of users, understand their problems and created a compulsion within me to help people solve their problems through the use of user experience design.

I was also reminded that working with teams is not always easy, but is something I really enjoy.