3:4 UX/UI Workshop

Steve ran a UX/UI workshop to help us understand user experience which is if users feel comfortable and at ease with using a software and user interface which is how easy the software is to use in terms of design. As we would be creating our own website and app for our borough’s as apart of the Dialekt project, we did tasks that put us in a position of creating a user for a mock app in order to adapt and understand our target audiences and what would appeal to them.

We were put in to small groups and I worked with Sidney and Sam, and we created two different character profiles complete with a portrait drawing, a bio, their needs and goals and their behaviours as all this info affects their user experience when using our app.

The first was Harry, a 16 year old student and the second was Angelica, a 47 year old beautician. It was actually harder than we thought to try and envision what a 16 year old boy and a 47 year old women need and how they would behave as neither me, Sam or Sidney could relate completely.

As the characters are completely made up, we decided to go all out and create the most niche character we could. Harry is an Alaskan national yoyo champion who likes Jazz and lives with his nurse mum. He needs financial support and loves to read and smoke pot. He is driven, focused (at being the best yoyo-ist) but introverted. Angelica lives in a council flat with 4 kids. She needs fake tan and botox and reads tabloids. She regularly uses social media, especially dating apps and she is flirty and loves attention. In hindsight, making Harry and Angelica so niche wasn’t the best plan but at the time we wanted to have fun with it so we didn’t realise this would bring complications later.

We then had to test our characters against a problem Steve gave to us which was “What’s for lunch?”. We had to create an app that one of our characters would use to solve this problem. The app would include solutions to other problems such as where to eat, pricing, health and taste. We then had to create a diagram to show what aspects from our characters profiles were the most important, least important, unknown and known and how these would affect the content and the UX/UI of our app.

For Harry, the most important and known aspects were that he is pescatarian and an artisan cook who knows a lot about nutrition. The least important but known aspects were that he has a packed lunch for school and prefers quality over quantity and likes to grow his own fruit and veg. The most important but unknown aspect was that money isn’t an issue for him because his mum earns a lot as a nurse. Lastly, the least important and unknown aspect about him was that he likes munchies and binges on sweet food but this is unknown as he knows a lot about nutrition.

For Angelica, the most important and known aspects were that she is conscious of what she eats to keep up her appearance, likes looks over taste for Instagram and that she is gluten free and likes detox foods. We didn’t have any least important but known aspects. The most important but unknown aspect was that she can’t cook and uses eating out as a social opportunity to meet someone. Lastly, the least important and unknown aspect about her was that she is an alcoholic and occasionally steals food from high-end supermarkets.

We then used these diagrams to help create an app to do with lunch for one of our characters. This is where our group began regretting that we made our characters so unnecessarily niche. For Harry, we thought of an open kitchen idea where you can use the app to rent out a kitchen to make your lunch if your not near-by home. There would be talk forums for users to chat and discuss and meal prep assistance. For Angelica, we thought of creating a lunch date/buddy app where you meet someone online through filters and preferences on the app and meet up with them to have lunch.

We decided to go with Angelica’s app as she uses lunch as a social opportunity, while Harry is introverted so he may not go for the idea of an open kitchen where he may have to face talking to other people.

We then mapped out the steps of our app from the point of view of Angelica.

So it begins with her wanting to find someone to have lunch with so she goes to Munch. This is the name of our app as it is a collaboration of the words ‘meet’ and ‘lunch’ and has connotations to eating. On the app homepage, she is shown a map of her current location and a sign up button. She signs up and makes a profile and then sets her parameters to narrow down her map and sets the other filters to her preference – cuisine, price and intentions. The app will then show her basic locked profile results to her filtered options on her map. She can then browse through the profile of other users which is just their filtered options and choose one she likes to send a request to join for lunch or invite for lunch. The other user can then reject or accept the request or invite and if they accept, it enables a chat feature. Their full profile is also unlocked which includes a picture and their personal bio and info needed to meet up with them. They then meet and eat and she can rate and review the restaurant, other user and app afterwards.

We made rough designs of what we wanted our logo and designs to look like before actually mocking them up on paper in the order of our map.

Overall, I had a lot of fun in this workshop and liked the app we made up as a team. I had never explored UX/UI from a user’s perspective and it really helped me shape the type of user’s that would use my website for my borough.