Methods

Empathy Mapping

Prior to prototype design, our group needed more in-depth understanding of our decisions and conceptualize with more definition to prepare for upcoming Contextual Inquiries Interview and for Prototyping. Additionally, we needed a collaborative tool that could give us deeper insight into our intended customers. To accomplish this task, we used Empathy Mapping to develop shared group understanding on user's needs and redefined our design with more definitive colors. Empathy mapping represents groups of users, and is very effective into seeing the wants and needs of a specific target group. Additionally, Empathy Mapping helped us with our initial Contextual Inquiry to shape our inquiries that are focused on gauging the users' interests.

Wireframing

Due to our exclusively online environment, our low fidelity prototype of the application was formed using Figma. This platform was a collaborative tool that allowed us to begin creating the beginning stages of our prototype. Admittedly, the low fidelity prototype was more time consuming to create since we were restricted from a paper prototype. Our methodology for designing the initial prototype was deciding what pages were necessary and drafting wireframes of each. The purpose of the wireframes were to keep the initial time investment low, and allow us to iterate our designs more easily. This method was useful because we could physically see how we wanted our app to work, and we could easily collaborate as a group to continuously make changes as our prototype evolved.Despite not being able to draft on paper, the wireframes were easy to iterate on due to having it saved automatically online.

Contextual Inquiry

Showcasing our prototypes to interviewee's allowed us to gather constructive feedback from another point of view over Zoom. Rather than driving the interviews ourselves, with contextual inquiry, the interviewing method are questioned as they are observed while in an environment. Specifically, in our project, one aspect of contextual inquiry that we implemented was that we allowed the interview to physically use the app and perform specific tasks that were designated to our prototype at the time. This type of interviewing allows for participants to take a more active role in the interview session so that we could see how they interact in all aspects. It also causes a more mutual conversation that can result in insights that may not have been achieved in a traditional interview. Due to the unpolished prototype, interviewee's were encouraged to be honest as they would not devalue our work. In fact, we urged they act normal and be honest, so that we can truly observe their natural reactions and reactions to the tasks that we asked them to perform. After we all conducted our contextual interviews, we reflected back on user feedback as a group through empathy mapping & empathy boards and strived to make changes that interviewee's had issues with.

Iterative Design

Figma allowed us to create a high fidelity prototype to improve our original idea and incorporate feedback from our contextual inquiry. Since we have already received feedback, it was more time-effective to put effort into a design that is as close as possible to the final build and will require little iteration. Incorporating usability heuristics such as consistency and standards played a role in the user experience. For instance, from our contextual inquiries, we learned that some users found that the colors and button sizes throughout the app were not exactly the same. We realized this could decrease the accessibility and overall usability of out app. Due to this, we realized how important testing a prototype with users because if we did not get our app tested, the goal of app would not be effective because of it having low usability levels at the time. Users testing our prototype really provided us with new feedback that we did not realize ourselves as a group. The interviewee's also gave us suggestions on how to make this app better in order to help achieve our goal of achieving higher levels of happiness through increased time management,. With Figma, we were also able to link these pages together using Figma's "present" feature to allow the user to see a "functional" form. Giving users the context of a working app allowed us to see how they navigated, allowing for open-ended questions to further iterate.

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