Project 1

I started my project by interviewing Junhan, and he told me about his recent experience of splitting a bill with friends at a restaurant. He said he was frustrated because the restaurant wouldn’t split their groups bill and it was difficult to work out who was going to pay and how everyone was going to pay them back.

From there I created my Research Plan. It was helpful seeing Miranda’s BFF Research Plan samples as this was my first time doing a Research Plan and it was good to see how she had structured it. I then made my User Interview Discussion Guide. At first, I struggled with the questions as I kept writing leading questions, however once I had reworded them, I felt a lot more comfortable to do my User Interviews. This was my first time doing User Interviews, however since I was interviewing people I knew I wasn’t too nervous. Halfway through my interviewing process I decided to add a few more questions in as I felt I wasn’t getting enough insights from my current questions. This was very helpful when I started synthesising my interviews as I had a lot more data to work with.

I then started Affinity Mapping. I found it hard to categorise at first as some of my headings were too brief. Once I went more in depth with my headings, I started to see some key points that I could work with. I found that the most interesting insights were that people wanted to know what they were paying for and they wanted only one person to pay the bill.

After synthesising I created my Persona. I really enjoyed this part of the project as it gave me a clear understanding of who I was designing for. It made me feel a lot more empathy for the user and I found it helpful to reference throughout the rest of my project. After this I wrote my problem statement and my HMW statement and then moved onto the ideation phase.

I did my Crazy 8’s with Lucinda, I enjoyed doing the 8 ‘worst’ first as it helped me to loosen up and get the silly ideas out of the way. From there I did my 8 ‘best’ and I was able to take a few ideas and combine them into one, which was to create an app that makes splitting a bill easier and notifies your friends when they owe money. I then did my user flow and started sketching which led to my prototype. I enjoyed using Marvel to create this and found it very easy to use.

I then moved onto my Usability Testing Plan and started by creating a Discussion Guide as I found this very helpful when doing my User Interviews. Although my prototype was very low fi, my users still gave me constructive feedback and said it was easy to use and they liked how few steps there were to complete a payment. After completing the Usability Testing, I synthesised my interviews and put the quantitative and qualitative data into a clear table which I found very helpful and could easily see my main findings from each interview.

Throughout this process I learnt a lot! Now I know the process I will feel a lot more confident with the next project. My main learning is I wish I hadn’t left my Usability Testing planning until the weekend as it was a longer process than I initially thought. I was also concerned I didn’t have enough detail in my Usability Test Plan however I plan to leave more time for this in my next project so I feel more confident going ahead with Usability Testing. I really enjoyed the first project, there was a lot of information to take in the first week of the course, but it helped that I could then apply the knowledge immediately. I have learnt a lot from this project.