Lynch Heppner
Roles
User Researcher | UX Designer | Usability Tester
Timeline
3 Months
Tools
Figma | Miro | Milanote
Project Brief
As the Capstone project in Springboard's UX Design Bootcamp, I was given complete freedom to choose a problem to attempt solving. I would go on to research the problem, research potential competitors, sketch and ideate possible design solutions, tinker with them alongside my peers and SB mentor, prototype, test the prototype with users, and ultimately make final edits based on user feedback. Phew!
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TLDR: I was responsible for the entire design process!
The Problem
Due to an excess of information from multiple streams (social media, YouTube, texts, etc.), many people in today’s world have developed a fear of missing out, or FOMO. After the isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, many people became even more isolated, which in turn, created an environment where in-person, “irl” gatherings are at an all-time premium.
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I set out to find a way to make discovering, planning, and attending in-person activities easier for everyone.
Research
Secondary Research
Research found that experts agree: social anxiety is a serious and widespread problem.
Studies show social anxiety can cause:
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Digestive problems
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Insomnia
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Depression
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Heart Disease
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Muscle Aches
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Memory Loss
Competitive Analysis
I studied the way other apps have attempted to solve this problem and decided to focus on Eventbrite, Facebook, and Meetup.
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Through my competitive analysis, I identified several gaps in the competitors that I believe leave enough room for a better solution in the market.
Primary Research
I was fortunate to find a group of participants to take a survey so I could learn more about users' habits and thought processes. I developed a screener survey to whittle out participants for which this would be irrelevant. Once I had a solid group of participants, I held a series of 1:1 interviews over the course of a few weeks.
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This was a crucial step in understanding who I would be designing for, and in conducting these interviews, I developed more solidified pictures of the potential users. Some of the main findings I uncovered are:
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Age - I found that the older the interviewee was, the more likely they have an established, often smaller, group of friends. They also might have a family that they need to plan events around/for.
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Location - Depending on how long the interviewee has lived in their current city, they might have certain places they have narrowed down as "usual" places or, if they are relatively new to their city, they will likely be more open to trying new places.
Primary Research
With these new findings, I developed four distinct personas, two for each side of the project. Since the solution will be based on displaying upcoming events, there will need to be a group of people who post events, i.e. "Hosts". And on the other side of course, there will be "Guests" who attend these events. Based on my research, there were two high-level categories for each type of user.
Hosts
Guests
While every user may not fit perfectly or exclusively into one of these personas, having these helps keep the end-users in mind as I move forward into the design process.
Design
Sketches & Wireframes
With the research done, I started the design process by sketching my initial ideas with the goal of flushing out my ideas. I like to sketch first before moving into tools like Figma or Adobe because I find it very helpful to just put pen to paper and start iterating on whatever comes to mind.
After many sketches, and several iterations, I landed on what I thought made the most sense and would solve my users' problems in the most intuitive way possible. So, I took my sketches to Figma and began laying out low-fidelity wireframes to get a better look at how the user flows would look.
Prototyping
Low-fidelity Prototyping
After talking over my wireframes with my mentor and classmates, I added interactions in Figma to begin the prototyping phase. The ultimate goal here was to get to a state where I could then conduct usability tests with potential users. Below are the first and second iterations of my prototype in action. Both show the simple task of selecting an event and adding it to a calendar, with more detail being added in the second example.
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Testing
I once again enlisted the help of roughly 10 volunteers to test the usability of my prototype. The goal here was to get a gauge of whether or not what I have so far "makes sense" to real users before bringing to full, production-level fidelity. I asked my participants to perform several tasks and asked them to reflect on what they noticed on each screen along the way to understand their thought process along the way. My goal, as a designer, is to make solutions that seem effortless to the user and this step is perhaps the most important one in making sure I achieve that goal. I took the feedback from the participants, made adjustments to the structure of the design and then developed the first high-fidelity prototype, a sample of which can be seen in a loop below!
Lessons
Finally, it was time to test out the revised version of the high-fidelity prototype. This was important to do because it offered the chance to test everything that I had worked on for this project, including the revisions that I made following the previous high-fidelity test.
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The second test went even smoother after I made the changes that my participants suggested during the previous test. The new group of participants reported no major issues while trying to complete the given tasks.
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The final high-fidelity prototype test went very smoothly. Despite using different participants, there still were almost no issues at all when the participants were asked to complete the tasks for the test. I think this serves as a promising sign that the user experience for this project is intuitive and offers functionality for the end users.