Project overview

Understanding the user

• User research

• Problem Statement and Persona

• User journey map

• User research: Pain points

User research: summary

To better understand the users I am designing for and their needs, I conducted interviews and created empathy maps. One primary user group identified through this research were college students who want to expand their horizons, knowledge and skills online.

This user group confirmed my initial assumptions about college students who wanted to read about how people learn online, without going to campus. However, the research also revealed that these users are limited in their ability to do so due to a number of factors, including:

• Trusting the reviews they see online

• Knowing where to start learning and what to learn first

• Finding a way to organize what they learn

After finding that, I moved into creating paper wireframes, wireframes, low-fidelity prototypes would turn into the first usability study and high-fidelity prototypes which turned into the closest prototype of the final product.

Problem Statement and Persona

User research: pain points 

1. Users showed frustrations while trying to go back into the starting point of the app on a table and on a smartphone screen.

• A user tried finding a button that will take them to the home-page without having to see the options screen
• A user tried to go back only scrolling the screen but was unable to complete action

2. Layout was condensed, which made actions too repetitive and took to long time to complete.

• A user did not find the action of scrolling too much pleasant
• A user commented that “Some fonts size is too big to read while others are too small”

3. There are not options for user to agree/disagree or comment on the app

• User interactions were expected by users since its about an opinion blog website/app
• Users were expecting to see a comments section so that they could see what others thought about the page/screen they had just interacted with

Starting the design

• Paper wireframes

• Digital wireframes

• Low-fidelity prototype

• Usability study 1

Usability study: findings

I conducted one Usability Study with the three screen sizes and the findings are as it follows; 

Low-Fidelity prototype to High-Fidelity prototype

(In the three different screen sizes)

• 4 out of 5 participants mentioned being unable to move sometimes from one screen to other
• 2 out 5 participants mentioned a “featured section” to find information faster
• 3 out 5 participants mentioned that is takes too much time to scroll down and other order could be better
• 2 out of 5 participants mentioned a “note taking” option could help them get more organized 
• 3 out of 5 participants mentioned that they will like to see an option that can help them know which courses to take based on their own interests 
• 2 out 5 participants mentioned that research out of the bloggers courses taken could help with trust building on the feedback and reviews
• Most participants, 4 out 5, wanted to connect with others who had read the reviews to discuss which courses to take.

Refining the design

• Low-fidelity prototypes to High-fidelity prototypes overview

• High-Fidelity Prototypes

• Second usability study findings

• Key mockups and screens

• Accessibility 

Accessibility considerations

1. Screen reading options will be enhanced on the final app/website

2. Pastel colors were applied and checked for accessibility reasons.

Going forward

• Takeaways
• Next steps

Takeaways

Impact: 

As my first Usability Study, I’ve understood the impact that thinking about accessibility has on different users. Adding different accessibility resources made me feel overwhelmed because that is something I neglected and never thought of. However, I thought about time where I couldn’t use a website because the text was too small and needed to use my glasses and that sometimes I’ve used screen reading options, and those options have been of great help. 

What I learned:

I have learned that there are many options in where to create projects to help different kinds of people in very different areas. I comprehended that there are a lot of thing that can be done and providing people resources to optimize their time and what they learn is a really important one.

One quote from peer feedback:

Next steps

1. Adding a comment section for users to interact with each other

2. Conducting an extra usability study

3. Adding text-to-speech options to final product

NOTE*

There is a published version of this project. This project is still under development. To see the outgoing project, please visit: 

https://sites.google.com/view/learningforlifeblog/home-learning-for-life