OVERVIEW
A test-based learning app that is designed with an aim to help designers across levels sharpen their knowledge about various design principles and their applications.
Having started my design journey couple of years ago, I have come across a lot of hurdles till now in my journey, all of them quite interesting and imparting a great deal of knowledge. Since the design community has been growing at a rapid pace recently and lot of new as well as established information has started to flow across the minds of designers, for the impact of the design principles to be profound, their understanding and their application must be clear in the mind of the designer. Hence, presenting DesignPal, a test-based application that aims to clear the understanding of the designer by bringing features that help the designer be not only clear with the concepts of the established design principles but also the new trends and principles.
THE FINAL WATCHLIST
PROBLEM STATEMENT
With so many information, being consumed by the designers across the globe, how do they, especially the new and junior designers, ensure that they are following the right application of the principal?
With this problem statement in my mind, and having experienced this first hand myself, I set out to find a solution to this problem. I carefully analyzed the problem statement that led me examine various laws in UX as well as re examining color theory, and many other concepts. With such an enormous amount of information, I was quite amazed how all these laws co-exist with each other harmoniously and amazing it would be for a designers to follow and have a clear understanding of the power these laws possess. But again, within the existing products, I didn’t get an appropriate solution to this problem. Hence I set out to attempt to make things a bit easier for my fellow designers and encourage more people to discover the beautiful world of design.
STORY THAT USUALLY TRANSPIRES
PROCESS
With this problem statement and the story that usually unfolds in my mind, I started to analyze the problem from it’s roots. I set out to understand why this problem has come up and what trends are behind it. Then as I proceed in my process, I spend time on ideating and prototyping different solutions that might ease the pain points.
INITIAL MARKET RESEARCH
Demand for UX designers to grow by 13% from 2017-2027.
A market research was conducted by me to ascertain the feasibility of the product about to be designed as well as to get to the roots of the problem. The demand for designers is going to boom over the next sum of years, and hence the concepts and principles are going to branch out as well. According to the NN group, the number of UX professionals is expected to grow from 1 million to 100 million by 2050. According to careerfoundry, to be a well-rounded and competitive UX designer, it’s smart to have an all inclusive approach to the user’s experience. This usually includes having an understanding of what technologies they’ll be using, how the products are coded and delivered, and the business strategies and goals that get products into people’s hands.
USER RESEARCH
Survey was conducted to have an idea of the problem penetration among the affected masses.
A survey, in the form of a google form was circulated among some people in and around my design community. The form received over 20 responses when I decided to close it down. The age group varied from somewhere around 17-23 years old.
A. 39% of the participants identified themselves as beginners, 18% identified themselves as intermediate and rest preferred not to answer that question.
B. 26% of the participants said that they feel that their design knowledge is mostly inadequate or untested. 61% marked they feel this sometimes.
C. 52% of the participants said they face problems in keeping track of their design learning process.
D. 48% of the participants said they think daily design challenges would be the most effective way to improve from their current design state.
To understand the mindset of the participants, and in turn the users, I narrowed down some interesting responses from the survey and decided to pursue some more deep analyzing sessions with them. Hence I decided to conduct some user interviews to properly gauge the problems they were facing.
Interviews revealed some deep insights amongst newbie as well as junior designers.
I conducted 5 interviews with participants from amongst those who had participated in the survey. I tried to understand their needs and frustrations. Here are some of their own spoken statements while giving interview.
THEY
SAID
IT
After deeply analyzing their statements and the survey results, I arrived at some of the following pain points.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Although some products try to address the pain points, but are often full of hurdles and complicated UX.
Much of the existing products solve the pain point of knowledge about new concepts and trends, but that in itself is not enough for inducing a design environment. Byju’s app was included because it is a test-based app and it’s analysis was key to the new product design. The aim which is to make application of design concepts and principles simpler and to attract more and more newbie designers was not fully achieved in any of the following apps.
PERSONA
To keep myself on a level with the user I am designing the product for, I prepared the persona of a potential user. This would help me understand the user better.
Giving myself an idea of how the potential user might interact with the product, what would be his/her reaction, does it impact their next action?, etc, I drew an empathy map to explain this better.
BRAINSTORMING IDEAS
For giving myself a thorough roadmap of where to brainstorm ideas, I prepared a set of HMWs and started to diverge my thinking on how to solve these problems.
A. How might we induce a design environment for the user?
B. How might we give more practice to the user?
C. How might we make the design learning process trackable?
D. How might we make the learning seamless and consistent?
After brainstorming some rough ideas, I put them on a NOW-WOW-HOW matrix to gauge the feasibility of each idea and where it stands if implemented.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Does the brainstorming exercise go shoulder-to-shoulder with the pain points expressed by user?
To make sure the above happens, I collect the feasible ideas from the WOW quadrant and do some affinity mapping with the reviews collected during the surveys and interviews, and the ideas that we have collected to figure out if I have covered their painpoints.
PAPER WIREFRAMES
Trade-offs between two alternatives...
A - Has less number of taps for the user, but at the same time is cluttered and confusing to view and hence to use.
B - Has one more step of tap for the user, but makes the design more clean to view and hence streamlines the flow.
Considering user flow and making the task easier for the user, I decided to go with B.
USER TESTING
How might we ascertain if the app is really usable by the intended user? Will the user flows assumed and the user flow that might be taken coincide?
To make sure that the product designed is user friendly and is able to relieve the pain points as expressed by the participants during the interviews and surveys, I decided to conduct a user testing of the product with the same participants whom I had selected during the interview. I conducted a total of 5 well-documented tests. The users had access to the fully prototyped product and I gave them some tasks to complete. I gave them the option of either giving the tasks all at once or one-by-one. I also gave them the option of asking for my presence during the testing or not.
Almost all of the participants did not use the search bar in the dashboard screen, hence considering the usability case the search bar was removed.
Most of the participants pointed out that there was no way of a quick navigation between questions and hence it created considerable friction in their flow. Hence a question slider nav bar was added with proper padding below the options for quick navigation.
FINAL DESIGN
Introducing DesignPal - a one stop tool for sharpening your UX/UI design knowledge.
Practice any test on design with seamless user flow.
The app intendeds to make the user clear their understanding about various design concepts by providing a wide array of tests and providing a seamless user flow during that process. The user can go to any test through any flow - through the chapters or scheduled tests. The user will then be guided to the subsequent screens leading to the tests and finally the scorecard, where the analysis of the test will be presented in form of cards.
See detailed solutions of the test as well use community to clear your doubts.
Not only do the users get a detailed solution of all the questions in the test, they can clear any doubts in any question by sharing it with the community. This will help in inducing a design environment for the user. Not only will the user clear the doubt, but he/she can also discuss more on that matter.
Analyze and plan ahead by tracking your progress through the dashboard.
The app includes a dashboard feature which helps the user track their design learning progress through a great variety of parameters like activity chart, syllabus status, sincerity index and improvement index. The cards contain more details about each and every individual test and amount of time spent by the user on the app, thus providing a clean slate to the user to start planning his/her future course of action.
Schedule any test according to your dates and plans.
An important USP of DesignPal is that it provides the option to schedule any test from any chapter the user wants to learn on any date. This brings a degree of accountability as well as flexibility to the learning process of the user. This feature, without an iota of doubt, will boost the consistency of user towards learning design.
Attempt the daily design challenge to boost creativity and learn new concepts.
DesignPal also comes with a daily design challenge, which aims to increase the creativity of the user by presenting different challenges each day. This also prompts the user to learn new concepts and latest trends in design and hence understand the usability of the design better.
Post, answer or just browse through your feed.
With an initiative to provide a design environment to those who don’t have one but are passionate about design, community is a great feature where the user can post doubts, articles, case studies, etc as well as reply and answer other’s questions/doubts or participate in some discussion going in the design community. The ever present function of the community feature is that it will provide a great design feed to the user to browse from.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PLANS
Going through this problem statement, I interacted with fellow designers a lot and this was a humbling experience. I explored new ways of ensuring UX is taken care of in the app design as well a monochromatic color scheme is followed properly. Although there were many hurdles in this amazing journey, finding the solutions to the problem statement was my main goal. Towards the end stages of this case study, I really hope design community could benefit from this.
In the future plans for DesignPal, I plan to introduce a proper filter feature which could segregate the tests according to the levels of the designer, also maybe one-on-one interaction with the individuals of the design community.
Overall, It was a great learning experience.
