WEEK 10: beFrank

Our extended horizontal slice presentation including our ideation process and all four user journeys.

CREATIVITY was the theme for our second official design sprint. We were tasked with designing a solution that enhances creativity and self-expression in people’s daily lives targeting any form of creativity. Our product also had to consider how it could enable people to explore their creative potential by promoting a positive and supportive culture of creativity.

For this sprint, I teamed up with Sarah; for analysis of the collaboration process itself, please see WEEK 9: Second Design Sprint – Process.

Kicking off the ideation stage, we started discussing what creativity means as a concept, what it means to us and the emotions that may be felt when attempting a creative endeavour. By taking such a fundamental approach to the sprint theme, we established a strong foundation for the goal of our product. I feel pleased with this outcome as it gave our product a mission. It became easy to make design decisions because the mission guided our direction. And if we ever got stuck on our next steps, we had clear aims to refer to. Even though this was only a test project, I am glad we took the time to develop our product goals, as it made for a much more effective result.

A key aspect of our discussion was that creativity is wide-reaching. We wanted to capture its inherent contradictions by leaving the ‘what’ (painting, designing, gardening, learning a programming language etc.) up to the user. Instead, we wanted to guide them through the whys and hows. Ultimately, we created a structured learning journal to help users progress with their creative goals and keep track of improvements giving them tangible proof of their increasing skills.

We identified four main user journeys that formed the basis of our horizontal slice: the First Timer, the Continuer, the Finisher, and the Curious Lurker.

The First Timer

Has undertaken creative projects before but lost steam somewhere in the middle.
Taking on a new project/skill feels overwhelming.
Wants to get organised and measure their progress.

The Continuer

Is in the throes of a creative project but is feeling demotivated and are not sure why.
Needs help to assess their progress so far.
Wants to document their progress.

The Finisher

Likes milestones.
Is motivated by seeing lots of smaller goals ‘completed’.
Enjoys the tangible feedback of their progression.

The Curious Lurker

Does not like to jump into the deep end.
Doesn’t know what they like or what they are good at.
Wants to test out what others have tried to see if it works for them.

Each journey was represented in our product by specific functions that users would experience. The Curious Lurker is brought to reading other users’ stories where they can begin a dialogue about the learning experience. The other three journeys represent the main functionality of the product. A series of quizzes guides the user to create a specific, measurable goal within a manageable time frame. By creating a personalised goal, the user suddenly has a direction to their creative challenge, allowing them to take small steps towards progress. For example, instead of:

I want to learn the guitar.

The product would guide you to be more specific to make your project achievable:

I want to learn Chopsticks – a beginner’s song – on the guitar over the next month. I will practice for 10 minutes every day.

Identifying the user journeys was a crucial step in the project, as it forced us to develop empathy towards what users need at different stages. Despite the journeys lacking detail, I still found them very helpful as they dictated our information architecture. This helped underline that identifying and understanding your users “is fundamental to creating exceptional products.” (Faller 2019). Moving forwards into future projects, I will develop more meaningful personas and use the Nielsen Norman Group checklist to ensure they are useful throughout the project (Salazar 2018).

This sprint was my first time developing site architecture. As an exercise, I found it integral to my thought process as without it, beFrank would have been nothing more than a blur in my mind, directionless and insubstantial. Without it, I would have struggled with every stage afterwards.

When working on the development stage, Sarah said how much she liked my sketching style, as it made it very clear for her to understand. Reflecting on that, I realise my sketches follow a straightforward style to help me understand and remember my own thought process. By taking steps to be empathetic towards my own brain chemistry, I inadvertently made things clearer for her to understand. It has been pointed out to me by various people that I am very organised, an observation I always found confusing as I assumed everyone was the same. But now I realise this is a valuable skill that I developed naturally and one that I will make a point of using in future projects.

All in all, I am happy with the outcome of sprint two. Not just our product, beFrank, but also the valuable skills I learned in digital collaboration across UX-specific programs, agile working methodology in practice, as well as gaining a clearer understanding of my own thought process. Empathy really does get you (and your team) far.

Things I would change

I am a visual person, so even though I know we were creating a horizontal slice to showcase the product structure, part of me still wishes we could have included pretty colours or animations.

I would have spent more time before jumping into the build stage to clarify the purpose of each section in the app. We went through several late-stage iterations due to unclear communication.

Next time, I will come to team meetings with a specific purpose to move forward with our decision-making.

The personal dashboard needs further iteration. I would include a placeholder image when the user is still early in their journey to encourage them to keep going. This placeholder could alternate with reminders to do the other quizzes.

I would love to develop the copy further, specifically the progress quiz questions. Small scale A/B testing could reveal some intriguing insights.

References

FALLER, Patrick. 2019. ‘What Are User Personas and Why Are They Important?’ XD Ideas [online]. Available at: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/ [accessed 26 Mar 2023].

SALAZAR, Kim. 2018. ‘Why Personas Fail’. Nielsen Norman Group [online]. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-personas-fail/ [accessed 26 Mar 2023].

German vocabulary of the week

Be frank. – Sei ehrlich.