Overview
Summary
User Testing
User Personas & Journey
Wireframes
What I’ve Learned
Summary
Project Goals
Our main goals for this project are as follows:
Understand students’ struggles and pain points when currently navigating physical and digital resources at Laurier.
Complete user personas and journey maps based on user research.
Propose a solution idea that is both digital and physical, and will allow for ease of navigation for students.
Methods and Results
Overall we were able to create a successful application which benefits the navigation of students on Laurier’s Brantford Campus. To do this we performed the following steps:
Understand client needs and wants
Create user personas based on user interviews
Create a low, medium and high fidelity prototype and perform task tests on each to understand user interaction
User Testing
Interviews
In order to understand our user’s needs we decided that speaking to them in person would be our best option.
We resided in a campus space and asked various students to participate in our semi-structured interviews.
We began with our initial question, which was open ended and asked them to explain their experience finding resources on campus.
Based on their answers we followed up with several other questions as well.
User Personas and Journey Maps
The user personas we created consisted of 4 user types:
The introvert
The extrovert
The tech savvy Introvert
The non tech savvy extrovert
The purpose of these were to showcase different groupings of user types that was found in the interview data.
Every persona has different needs, wants, and problems that need to be addressed.
For each persona, we created a user journey map. This is the one created for the extrovert.
This shows a student’s thoughts when they are searching for information at the Academic Advising centre. This shows where each persona seems to run into problems, and at which points they get frustrated.
Wireframes
Low-Fidelity
We created a low-fidelity wireframe to focus on:
Layout
Information Organization
Using this we surveyed users to find out if our concept was understandable, and provided all the information they would desire in such an application.
Medium-Fidelity
This wireframe was built strongly off of our low-fidelity concept, with some added features and visuals. As well, this prototype was interactive, so users were able to navigate through the wireframe as if it were an app. To test this iteration we used task tests to measure completion rate, error rate, time on tasks, and verbal comments. This allowed us to locate errors in navigation, or frustration points.
High-Fidelity
From testing our medium-fidelity prototype, we have added further features such as the ability to navigate through accessible routes for those with mobility issues. We have also redesigned several pages to better suit our users’ needs. In future steps we will be testing this iteration using task tests again to see how users interact with this prototype, and create further improvements for our final design.
What I’ve Learned
Overall, I feel that I have continued to learn more about the user experience process as a whole throughout this project. Within this we have combined project management planning, user centred thinking, client relations, and convergent/divergent thinking.
Within this project I am putting together the various types of knowledge I have gained throughout my years in school, in order to create an effective solution with my team. We have been needing to work cooperatively and efficiently in order to ensure both client and user needs are being met in a timely manner.
I think it has be beneficial to again practice gathering data, brainstorming solutions, and executing and testing various levels of wireframes with my team.