Task
This was a project done in 2021 for an Design Agency Client.
Project goal
Infants outgrow their toys quickly and parents always have to get new toys for them. We want to provide a way for the parents to find out if others in the same location are interested in toy exchange, instead of just relying on family and friends and maybe exchanging toys with them.
My role in the team
I worked in a cross-functional team of 3 people. I was involved in all stages of the project, from mapping out the problem to delivering the final designs.
Research
More about the project
Challenge
I wanted to create a comprehensive service to promote the benefits of exchanging toys between different families, saving money for the families, protecting the environment and also encouraging people to communicate between them and create a better community.
What to include in research:
Create a mobile native app that is accessible to all ages. It will provide an online marketing service dedicated to used toys, some of the toys being impossible to buy as brand new for many families. The app will also play a key role in the local community by encouraging people to communicate, donate or educate.
Research
Design process
Design process is a way of figuring out what you need to do, then doing it. Along the way, you might solve one or more problems, try to achieve a goal, and/or create something specific.
Research
Discovery
Discovery is a preliminary phase in the UX design process that involves researching the problem space, framing the problem(s) to be solved, and gathering enough evidence and initial direction on what to do next. Discoveries do not involve testing hypotheses or solutions.
Discoveries are crucial to setting design projects off in the right direction by focusing on the right problems and, consequently, building the right thing. They are often referred to as ‘product discoveries’ (although I’m not keen on this name because it can set the expectation that this phase is about discovering requirements for a given product).
In order to be effective, discovery should be broad and technology- or solution-agnostic. When teams carry out a discovery on a product they have already decided to build, it no longer is a discovery, but, instead, it becomes a requirements-gathering exercise or a validation exercise where teams seek to confirm that their solution is the best. The discovery is off track when teams are asked “How do we make [insert name of solution] work for users?” or told to “Go find out what the user needs are for [insert name of solution]”.
A discovery should start with a broad objective such as: “Go find out about this problem, just how big it is, and what the opportunities might be.”
Well-done discoveries ensure that any solutions proposed later are desirable to users, viable for the organization, and feasible with the technology made available.
Research
Define personas and journey maps
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based on your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas helps the designer to understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals.
As designers, we shape personas iteratively. We divide users into manageable groups and represent each with a typical embodiment – a persona.
Design
UI information arhitecture
As a standard part of the UX process, designers create information architecture when building products. Defining every avenue and path that users can take through an app or website, information architecture is much more than just a sitemap to show what page leads where.
As part of the UX process, IA design follows very similar patterns to flowcharting: Add shapes and connect them with lines in an organized fashion to a single document. The challenge when building IA is in understanding how your app actually works from the user’s perspective, and how to organize that information into a readable, legible format.
There are two major requirements for actually constructing IA: organizing it through a visual hierarchy and creating a legend for displaying different types of features, interactions, and flows. With a standard flowchart, the shapes follow specific requirements;
In other words, the most important factors in building your IA are where individual components of the architecture are placed (hierarchically), and how they’re labeled and displayed.
Design
Design system
A design system is a library of reusable components and guidelines that people within a company can combine into interfaces and interactions. What goes into a design system and how it is implemented can vary quite a bit from company to company, depending on the size and maturity of the design practice and the needs of the product team.
Design
Paper and digital low-fi wireframes
Paper wireframes were converted into digital ones and prepared the clickable prototype for the first user testing. Please have a look at a couple of highlights of some wireframes for the user flow used in the gorilla testing.
Design
UI Screens
Paper wireframes were converted into digital ones and prepared the clickable prototype for the first user testing. Please have a look at a couple of highlights of some screens for the user flow used in the gorilla testing.
