Creating a Web application prototype ( low fidelity )
Interaction design and prototyping journal(SMU mod)
This journal serves as a documentation of our thinking processes and learning throughout the low-fidelity portion of our IDP course.
Design thinking is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what is viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity- Design Thinking by Tim Brown, Harvard Business Review, June 2008, pg 86
Introduction:
As part of the School of Information System’ s core curriculum at SMU , students are required to enrol for the module called “Interaction design and prototyping (IS211)”. In this article, I will be talking about the journey throughout the low-fidelity segment of this course and showing how we worked through the Covid-19 situation.
Week1 :
Our group comprises of people from different backgrounds and different ages, we all tend to have different concerns for society and have differing ideas of solving problems in our day-to-day lives. As we all had different ideas, we came out with different ideas on our own and presented to each other at the end of the week. The ideas are:
Idea 1: Chatterbox:
Problem
In light of the pandemic, classes in SMU are mostly conducted online and we have observed that undergraduates, especially freshmen, experience difficulty in seeking academic help from their professors and seniors due to the lack of physical interaction that one usually receives in a traditional seminar setting.
Idea
SMU Chatterbox is a mobile application that provides a one-stop platform for students to seek out for the academic help they need. Students can search and filter their questions based on schools or modules through the app to seek clarification. Alternatively, if students are still unable to find their answers, they can also post their questions through the app for peers, seniors and professors to respond. Students may approach their responders through an in-built private messaging feature for further explanation.
Additionally, the app provides a forum for seniors and professors to post SMU lifehacks for students to follow. This allows students to be more prepared for classes and how to manage the semester.
In summary, SMU Chatterbox aims to facilitate students’ academic learning, as well as build meaningful connections within the SMU community.
Idea 2: FindMyTutor
Problem
There is a lack of information about private tutors and information is usually based on word-of-mouth. Finding good and affordable tuition was not easy, exacerbated by empty promises of branded tuition centres. As such, many paid a premium and dismissed the idea of engaging private tutors where some are more than qualified.
Idea
Tapping on Singaporeans’ tech-savviness, a mobile application -FindMyTutor- will be able to provide information about private tutors and unbiased reviews for parents/students to choose the right tutor. Tutors’ schedules will be present to ease the planning of student’s tight schedules. These schedules can be synchronized with tutors’ and tutee’s phone calendars to facilitate better planning.
FindMyTutor will be able to host online sessions but ultimately aims to match students with suitable tutors for face-to-face sessions due to limitations of online sessions. By doing so, we will also be able to work with brick-and-mortar tuition centres. In essence, FindMyTutor provides the information required for choosing the right tutor, being a one-stop platform to engage tutors and bridge the information gap. Requirements-A database is important in this application as there is a large repository of information required to be stored.
Idea 3: Lookout
Problem
With the current COVID-19 situation, many choose to travel in private transport instead. Car accidents and Car blockages due to bad parking may happen more frequently. Drivers are unable to contact other drivers because they might not be on the ground. This would cause unnecessary trouble while mindlessly waiting for the other party to arrive.
Furthermore, when an accident arises, people may not know what is required to apply for car insurances.
Idea
By using the app Lookout, we will be able to allow drivers to communicate efficiently and anonymously — without giving their personal information such as their phone numbers.
To allow drivers to have more privacy, there would be encrypted calls and messages for the application.
By allowing efficient communication between drivers, this would ensure that drivers are more responsible when they are parking their cars. It will also be easier to contact them if other drivers have accidentally damaged the user’s car.
Additionally, Lookout provides a step-by-step uploading guide for users to apply for car insurances.
Idea 4: Real time ride-hailing price comparison app
Problem
The inconvenience of opening multiple ride-hailing apps to compare prices between them.
Currently, to compare prices between ride-hailing services in Singapore, one has to open and enter the pick-up and drop-off location into every ride-hailing app individually. This makes it extremely tedious for a consumer to make an informed decision.
Idea
An application that provides real-time price comparisons of the various ride-hailing companies and will direct users to their selected ride-hailing company application for them to proceed with the booking and payments.
In summary, the app quickens the process of price comparison between the companies and allows users to make informed decisions.
Learning points from Week1:
- It is fine to take ideas that have been done but we just need to think about additional features that will allow our idea to stand out.
- Most of our ideas seem to have been implemented.
Week 2
In week 2, four of our ideas were pitched to our instructors ( University Professors). To our dismay, none of our ideas seemed to impress them. That being said, we had received some constructive feedback on ways to improve our ideas.
Ultimately, we had to decide one of the four ideas that we have come out with. This was not an easy process as we felt that they are workable. As such, we went through the projects individually and assessed the feedback the instructors have given us.
Feedback from Instructors summarised
Process of choosing our final idea
Initially, we debated each others’ idea, in which the person who came out with the idea being on the defensive side while the rest on the offensive side.
However, as the debate continued, we all became more convinced of our ideas which were not the intention of the debate as the debate was supposed to help us pinpoint our ideas’ flaws and thus rejecting three out of the four .
Subsequently, we implemented the effort-value graph and decided to go ahead with “FindMyTutor” and changing the name to ‘The Academy’ as we aimed to appeal both tutors and tutees.
Finalising problem statement
Having found the project we wish to work on, we started working on our problem statement which we took close to an hour crafting. We felt that we needed to have a well-established problem statement as we had to be clear of the purpose and the goals that our project aims to accomplish.
Problem statement:
Tutors and tutees alike, face numerous difficulties when utilising tuition agencies as intermediaries. Some of these identified difficulties include the inefficient matching process between the two parties and the mismatch of tutor to tutee. The lesson arrangement process can also be onerous due to the dynamic schedules of both tutor and tutee. Furthermore, due to the recent pandemic, tutors and tutees are unable to meet physically and are required to conduct lessons virtually. This brings about disruptions, not only in the teaching process for tutors, but also in the learning process for tutees.
Learning points from Week 2:
- We learned that the feasibility and scalability of a project has to be considered
- The value and effort of our project are also crucial.
Week 3 (Observation stage) :
How did we observe?
We approached 2 main categories of participants: tutors and tutees.
● Tutors : Our groupmates happen to be acquainted with a few tutors who worked in different environments (freelance, full-time and online). Due to the COVID-19 situation, we scheduled a zoom call with them. We managed to observe their decisions through screen share and interviewed some of them too.
● Tutees : We approached parents and students who previously had experiences in finding tutors. Similar to the tutors, we observed them through screen share and interviewed one of the tutees.
What activity(ies) did we observe?
We mainly observed how the participants conducted their search for tutors/tutees, the type of platforms they used, and the technology they possessed when carrying out the task.
Based on our observations, we have identified inefficient processes (indicated in the circle of REDundancy as shown above) which result in huge time delays for both tutors and tutees.
We had observed the entire journey of how our participants will look for tutors/tutees, until the point where they make payment. We also identified the pain points faced during the process and conducted interviews at the end of the observation to gather insights about their experiences.
Pain Points
Breakdowns
As there were many pain points observed, we broke down into 3 main issues raised by participants. Firstly, tutors experience difficulties trying to find tutees, vice versa. Secondly, there were scheduling difficulties. Lastly, it was difficult to teach and learn online.
This was an example chart of how we mapped our pain points to the breakdowns.
Ideation
After having a clear understanding of our participants’ problems, we moved on to the ideation stage. This is where the fun begins.
We started thinking about different ideas and typing them down on our chart. We chose not to think about the difficulties of executions and more on the line of whether it will be able to help our participants and being something we will like to use. We were also unafraid of exploring more advanced features like augmented reality.
Learning points from Week 3:
- Observations can provide us with information we do not initially know.
- Interviews should be conducted in a manner that it does not pressure our interviewees and we should have some prompts along the way to facilitate better answers.
- Having a point of view from someone who is not part of the project is very important as our team members were unable to plan for every case.
Week 4
Personas:
Using the pain points that our participants have faced and the traits they possess, we created two personas with one of them being our primary persona. Our primary persona assumes the role of a tutor while the secondary persona assumes that of a tutee.
Personas review:
With the packed schedule of our course, we realise that having two personas may cause a disadvantage to our group as that means we have double the workload as compared to other groups. After much deliberation, we decided to continue working with two personas as our web application caters to two groups of individuals: the tutors and tutees. As such, it is important to factor both parties in our project
Scenarios:
We have 3 scenarios, 2 of them will be easy ones where we do not encounter any problems while the last one is when our persona encounters a few issues.
Learning points from Week 4:
- Personas have to be as real as possible as they will help you to understand your users better
Week 5
Prototyping Stage:
Having a strong understanding of our participants’ pain points and our solutions was important in our prototyping stage. Bearing this in mind, we started to craft our navigation diagram for our web application, aimed at helping us visualise the flow of our application.
Rough sketch of our prototype:
We initially made rough sketches, sought for inspirations from other webpages and refined along the way. Ultimately, we designed our prototypes in alignments with the Jakob Nielson’s 10 heuristics.
Heuristic Evaluation:
We were fortunate to have six evaluators and received really good comments on how to improve our web application. As each of them had more than 10 comments each, we categorised them according to our features and the severity of the problem they have indicated. We assessed every problem the evaluators faced and considered how we can implement their suggestions to our web application.
Conclusion:
In the span of less than six weeks, we have gone through the processes of idea generation, understanding the needs of target audiences, identifying problems, crafting personas and scenarios, prototyping and evaluating. Through these processes, we can see how they intertwined and how the process seemed to follow a funnel approach. This process has allowed us to have a general overview of the whole application and zooming in to the details and intricacies of designing an application or website.
