Mobile App Design

My team created a detailed team charter to outline important details for our team such as how we will work together, communicate and determine our level of success. I looked into our client to try to learn more about the company and what they do. Before meeting our client my team and I put together a set of questions we wanted to cover in our meeting with the client. I was able to get a good understanding of the project and its purpose once we reached out and had an official kick-off meeting with our client. The client meeting provided us with a lot of insight into what this project will be, including expectations for communication and our deliverables. After receiving a statement of work document, expectations from our client and hearing about their vision for the app my team and I were able to outline the project, define the problem we were going to solve and create a project timeline and a full design brief.

I dove into user and industry research and created a spreadsheet to outline my findings. My team and I brought all of our individual research together to go over our findings. We analyzed our research and put together a research report including some personas. During this week, we met with our client for any feedback and to make sure we were on track with the personas, solutions for the problems we were addressing and the design ideas we had come up with based on our research. Our research as well as the collaboration within our team and with our client gave us a lot of insight for this project. We got a good starting point from our research and discussions with our client. At this stage, we understood the average users of the application and understood what we should and shouldn’t include in our designs.

In our team meeting we did the "Crazy 8's" activity for some quick idea generation. In this exercise we had eight minutes to each sketch out eight ideas for some screens of the app. I really enjoyed the activity and thought it was beneficial, especially in starting the next part of our project, the idea generation/design phase. We discussed our sketches from the "Crazy 8's" activity. We brought all of our ideas together and brainstormed ideas for the core components of the app and potential user flows, eventually narrowing them down to the key pages of the app. We settled on a set of sketches that captured key features of the mobile application. Additionally, in this stage of the project we worked both individually and collaboratively to put together the lean and value proposition canvases. We each put together our individual canvases and had a meeting to discuss and create a lean and value proposition that captured all of our ideas. We found that a lot of our ideas were overlapping for both the canvases as well as in our concept sketches so it was good to see that we are all aligned for the vision of the app. Going through the process of individually creating the concept sketches and canvases and then having a meeting to discuss and merge our ideas definitely helped us clarify the vision and plan for the next steps of the design process of the app.

We worked on putting together the low-fidelity designs for the three main flows of the app. Once we had our low-fidelity designs and consulted with our client, I moved on to putting together the hi-fidelity designs. I created a design system for the app and for our client to refer to which included the primary, secondary, and accent colours used in the designs as well as multiple reusable components for the interfaces, such as the navigation bar or a course card. This was an exciting week since we could start to really see all of our previous work coming together and bringing the idea to life!

In this stage of the project our focus was on polishing the hi-fidelity designs and making connections between our wireframes to create an interactive prototype. We created any additional pages that needed to be in each flow to make sure it was logical. To create our user tests and be able to gather some data, we used the platform Maze.co. On Maze, we put together the user testing scenario and had users go through the scenarios using a shared link. We were able to gather data from users this way and get some insight into what was working, what wasn’t, and if users were having any difficulties in navigating or using the app. We got some good insight and feedback for our design from both the Maze tests and direct feedback from our client. Our team created a prototype testing report that showcased the designs, each of our test scenarios, and our analysis of the data we collected. We included actionable items for where we can improve the design of the app.

We made some revisions to our designs based on our analysis of the results of the user testing. We spent this final stage making the revisions, cleaning up our final project solution, and putting together our final pitch presentation.

It was a great project opportunity to have hands-on experience for each stage of the project ranging from problem definition to user testing. It was wonderful to see the concept of the app come to life throughout the course of the project.