Dayre is a micro-blogging mobile app that pieces together all your thoughts, pictures, location tags, and videos posted to tell your story for the day.
The goal of the project is to first improve the on boarding experience of new users. Second, to acquire more users by creating more awareness on the app. And lastly, increase referrals overtime.
Together with me, there is Carol and Nate. Our responsibility covers evaluating the current design of Dayre, and propose new features and design change by the end of two and a half week.
Double Diamond
Double Diamond process is a great tool we have used to define the scope of the work that has to be done over a period of 18 days. This allows us to stay focus on our everyday objectives and achieve our goal.
The double diamond process can be broken down into 3 stages.
Stage 1: Discover (6 days)
This is the introductory stage where we set the stage to probe deep to understand our stakeholders, and business objectives. We use UX methodologies such as ‘Stakeholder Interview’, to understand the problem that the business is trying to solve, the wants and needs of their users, and their business goals.
“Speak Human. Feedback is for human beings, so address them as such. Use the words your users use.” — Dan Saffer
Stakeholder Interview
We kickstart the project by conducting an interview with the stakeholder, the international manager of Dayre. This helps us to understand their company culture, business needs and goals. It is important here to probe and listen out to the stakeholders concerns and challenges.
After spending a day with the stakeholder, we moved on to gather insights from existing Dayre users.
iTunes I Google play User Feedback
We began our research by studying every feedback posted by Dayre users on iTunes and Google play with the help of AppAnnie.
Below are some of the key insights gathered:
The users’ frustration help us to brainstorm and think of possible solutions as seen below.
Jakob Nielson’s 10 Usability Heuristics
Usability Heuristics represent a set of check-list for best design practices. In Jakob Nielson’s heuristics, he has a 10 user-interface rule of time that we can check against existing design on Dayre.
Below are our findings:
Research Methods
1) Diary Studies
Within GA’s co-working space, we went around looking for non-Dayre users to help us understand how a first-time user would interact with Dayre. We were fortunate to recruit 7 participants; of which 3 were males and 4 were females. For a period of 3 days, users would self-report their activities at regular intervals to create a log of their activities, thoughts, and frustrations. It is a useful approach in helping us to capture organic feedback on activities that might be repetitive, long, or unpredictable.
2) User Interviews
We further our qualitative research by conducting interviews with 12 participants; out of which 9 were Dayre users, and 3 were bloggers from other social blogging platform such as Tumblr and Wordpress.
Example of some Questionnaires asked:
Stage 2: Define (4 days)
This is the process where we start to consolidate our research findings. We mapped out what were the pain & pleasurable points, identify trends, and understand how different users influence decisions. On top of the that, we had also cross-reference with best practices practied by design leaders.
Affinity Map
We started making sense of every single data gotten out of the interviews by writing them down on post-it notes and grouping them according to the category ‘Pain’, ‘Pleasure’, and ‘Advise & Encouragement’, as seen below.
With the Post it Notes up on the wall, we’re able to easily identify and group similar trends together. They were then given an essence(header) that could represent each group.
“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford
The headers highlighted in ‘yellow’ represents the essences.
The quote below explains the importance of deriving with the essences from the affinity Map really well
“What we can do in terms of the little way we can make life better for people is to make products that really speak to the needs they don’t even know that they have”. — JD Buckley
Bridging the gap between business goals & user goals
After understanding the user goals above, we align them with the business goals of our stakeholders. As a result, we will achieve our design direction as per the orange circle below.
Introducing our Personas
Personas are fictional characters created to represent the goal and behaviour of the different users we’ve interviewed previously. Justin and Rebecca has been introduced to help guide us in our design decisions.
Journey of Justin
Going back to the needs and goals of Justin, there are three things: understand what is Dayre about, have control of who has access to his blog and to be able to search for his girlfriend’s profile.
By mapping out Justin’s user journey; we’re able to understand the context of his frustrations experienced at different touch points or environment when using Dayre app. The above ‘opportunities to explore’ are potential solutions to solve those frustrations.
Piecing the puzzle
• On-boarding Experience
• Features with usability issues
On-boarding Experience
On boarding is like our first date with new users: we want to come across as accommodative and attractive as possible to seduce them into using our product. Thus, we want our introductory tutorial to be as welcoming as possible.
Before we ideate on a good on-boarding experience, we first look at our competition and understand how designers tackle design problems. The next thing we look at would be the best design practice.
Competition
From the above, we focus only on 4 things: the number of on boarding screens that are presented to users, the number of interaction a user have to go through, the methods used to onboard users and how Dayre recommend contents to user.
Best Practices
We further backed our design decision with the standard design best practices:
IOS Human Interface Guidelines
“Delay a login requirement for as long as possible. It’s best when users can navigate through much of your app and use some of its functionality without logging in.”Google Play Human interface Guidelines
“Users should be able to choose to ignore registration and continue as a guest, where they can sample and assess its value to them, before committing to register. Always put the user in control of their time and initial experience of the app.”
Stage 3: Ideate and Prototype (8 Days)
The final goal at this stage is to ideate and create a final prototype. It incorporates our proposed design thinking, backed-up with methodologies used to derive to our decision-making.
“My design mantra is go wide, prioritize, go deep. Get a lay of the land, use that to figure out what’s important, and start knocking things out in order of priority.” — Allison House
Other Recommended changes
• Consistent Tab Bars
• Enhanced Navigate and UI
• Toggling between posts
• Peekaboo Hint
• Day/date instead of “Day 100”
• Landscape/Portrait Photos
• Notification icon on top left removed and place in notification tab
• Sign up only when user is ready to commit
Rapid Prototyping
We went through multiple iterations before delivering the final prototype. We quickly started off from a low-fidelity prototype to a high-fidelity prototype with usability testing included.
First Iteration — Low-Fidelity
Low-fidelity is a prototype that is sketchy and incomplete, that has some characteristics of the target product but is otherwise simple, usually in order to quickly produce the prototype and test broad concepts. Paper prototype have helped understand right away whether users are able to achieve their goals.
Paper prototypes are presented. They are the cheapest and yet the fastest way of delivering the prototype right into the hands of our participants for testing. This greatly aid us in understanding the usability issues of our design ideation right at the start and make quick iterations. Below are the feedbacks we’ve received from our participants.
Second Iteration — Wireframing (Mid-Fi)
Third Iteration — High-Fidelity Prototype
After performing all the usability testing and making changes to the design
Final Prototype
The video showcase our final prototype
In conclusion
Making the decision to take up the UXDI program in General Assembly has been the best decision I have made in life. I’m thankful for the great exposure General Assembly has put me through. A big shoutout to the most amazing instructor
, and not forgetting my beloved classmates!
