My Other September 11

Unlike virtually everyone else in the country, I was not plugged into the television that Tuesday morning. Instead, I was writing in my office. It was going well so I let my pencil carry me forward…

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Exquisite App

Hello we are team Exquisite!

The first challenge we tackled was creating a logo representing our team. As we did not know what our website/application was going to be, we freely sketched our ideas that would represent our team name: exquisite.

exquisite: extremely beautiful and, typically, delicate.

These are the few sketches and as how the word exquisite defines, we aimed our logo to be fancy and luxurious. Each member’s logos had its creativity and ideas so we attempted to incorporate most of the characteristics we liked into our polished logos.

Then, we took a poll to see which of the polished logos fit our team the best.

We felt Tyler best represented our ideas.

Team Exquisite members believed that Tyler’s logo represented our team the best as it looks classy and simple. It also fits with the idea we have in mind for our project.

We may enhance more details in the future for this logo but as of now this will be the logo that will represent Team Exquisite and we are ready to tackle the next upcoming challenges!

Brainstorming

Throughout the first week of our group decided to meet multiple times to get to know each other more in order to make our dialogue more efficient. This way we could discuss our ideas with more confidence and understand the ideas from our group members better.

During our discussion we gathered around 10 different ideas that we debated around. The ideas ranged from culinary applications to assemble recipes to crowd sourcing fashion styles. We decided that our main need, the problem we need to solve, was that of limited vocabulary. We found that as students, we are required to read a vast amount of articles with heavy vocabulary that is very specific to the topic. Our idea then became to create a way to allow people to learn the words that surround their field in fun and innovative ways. It is difficult for people to sit with flashcards and memorize terms thus, the solution to our problem is make learning vocabulary for your specific interest fun and memorable.

Interviews

Our group decided to interview people with varying ages. We decided to investigate the age range where people have this problem. We found that people under 35 are very interested because they find themselves having a hard time learning colloquial to their field language. In our interviews we decided to focus on: media consumption (physical or digital), studying methods, learning methods, type of applications that people use, studying with people or alone, and, ultimately, how often do people look-up words again because of a lack of learning the terms. We found interesting data after interviewing over 20 people between all of our group members. The main data we found explains to us that most people who do not read as much as college students do not really find this to be a life-breaking problem but that they would like to expand their vocabulary in a social/competitive way. The younger people we interviewed agreed that the concept of making your own list of words you want to learn is a very crucial aspect. This is because often the apps that are out there only feed you words that they choose, not words that have any particular meaning or attachment to the user. We found that people solve aspects of this problem by “Googling” words that they do not know. However, we all agreed that googling words did not mean learning the words. Although most of our subjects did not seem particularly eager to use our idea to solve their problems, they agreed that a fun way to learn vocabulary of their choice was a good idea and often a problem when it comes to writing papers or reading articles for their classes.

Competitive Analysis

We explored the App Store in order to find applications that attempted to solve our problem. We discovered the application Magoosh. With this application we found a key concept that we would like to use ourselves: competition. However, there is no attempt at solving the personalized aspect of our problem. The app does not have a way to make your own list. We also played with the Vocabulary.com app. This app proved to be a form of dictionary that does not have any particular fun aspects to it, it is bland and boring. The app Word of the Day also made it into our list of possible problem solving apps yet, we found that although it has some great features like banner notifications of a word with a definition, there is no incentive to learning the words. We explored more apps and as we went deeper into the list of available applications we found a key similarity between all apps: there is no emergent personalized list of terms the user wants to learn! Here is where our problem exists and the task we want to solve.

Analysis of Our Needfinding Data

What do people do when they stumble across a word that they do not know the meaning of? Most people nowadays can agree that a physical, handheld 10 pound dictionary is obsolete when there is the web just at our fingertips. Based on our need finding data after conducting roughly 21 interviews, almost all of our participants’ solutions to the question at hand was one simple word: Google. Whether they were reading an online news article, a fashion blog, or a Biology textbook, it was the most convenient to pull out their phones or use their laptops to type the word into Google search. After this step, only a few would care to jot down these words and definitions onto their notepads. If they did not have pen and paper, they would manually enter the word into their digital notepad with the intention of going back to it later. Then finally, there were also those who would try to memorize the word on the spot or create a mental “save it for later” type of to-do list in their heads. As our class consists of many students who are Cognitive Science majors, we have all learned that we can effectively boost our working memory by rehearsal so that new, meaningful information can become stored into long-term memory. Thus, after analyzing our need finding data, our group members agreed that we should build a vocabulary app that is convenient, simple to use, and can promote effective learning for personal or academic success.

Then came the fun part! Utilizing the three “S’s” of storyboarding- Setting →Sequence →Satisfaction, we all created our own distinct personas and three storyboards to match. We purposely did not share our illustrations until our next group meeting so that we wouldn’t influence each other’s ideas or initial approaches. And sure enough, our personas ranged from high school students, undergraduate students, postgraduate students, to young working professionals. Below are some of the personas we came up with:

Sharing our individual visions played a huge role in our creative, development process. We were able to see that our app will ideally help users accomplish goals such as: ace exams and get good grades, practice effective learning strategies, and allow the user to save a task for later by a simple tap and save or by telling Siri. By being able to visualize our user goals, we feel confident and excited to tackle the next part of our task, which is prototyping our app!

Initial Lo-Fidelity Prototypes

After completing our storyboards, we used their contextual situations as a basis for the creation of our initial prototypes. The opening scenario is when the user is reading an online journal/blog/news article and comes across a word which he/she does not know the definition to.

On both iOS and Android, when you highlight a word that you wish to save or study, a contextual menu pops up allowing you to choose or create a list of your choice to place the word into (hypothetical situation is shown on the left from our initial prototype). After having done this, you may continue reading rather than having to opt out and search up the definition before you forget. This is because after moving the word to the Exquisite app, you can easily access it later by opening up the app whenever it is the most convenient for you.

Home Screen — The moment you open the app, you are presented with the home screen. This is where we want all the bulk of the application’s content to be displayed. We want a straight forward, clean interface that is neither cluttered nor overwhelming. The goal is to easily access and learn words that you have added to the lists.

Search Box — This is where you can search for words since this application is based off of a dictionary.

Customized Lists — You can have multiple customized lists or one large list, depending on your needs and how you wish to group the words.

Subscribed Lists — A subscribed list will allow the user to follow other groupings of words that the users of the application have put together themselves.

Study — The study button allows you to test your knowledge and reinforce your understanding of the words added to your customized list.

Settings — This is where the you can access and change your notification options and font adjustments.

One of our initial protypes that shows all the words that the user chose to add into his list.

This is another take on the overall approach to the application and how it should work.

As you can see, we had a few hand drawn prototypes running in parallel with our digitalized prototypes. This method also succeeded by revealing to us a wide range of diverse ideas.

User testing comparing two of our prototypes.

After completing our first lo-fi prototype, we moved on to the first user testing phase where we had other classmates try out our application. As stakeholders for this app, it is absolutely crucial to put it in the hands of a user and observe at which parts they struggle and see what parts they enjoy the product. By careful observation and noticing what the user is having difficulty with, we will be able to know exactly what will need to be fixed, added, or perhaps removed altogether. Furthermore, this insight will be useful to us because since we are the developers, we may already have a biased sense of thinking.

User testing in progress: Trying to have the user navigate on his own before we have to demonstrate exactly what should be done.

Based on the testing and evaluations made by fellow Team Puppy Squad, we were able to gather some information like what features the users liked, issues the users had, features that they thought were missing, and suggestions for improvement. The two main features that all the users liked about our app were: the essential, simple and sleek design of the app as well as the flashcards feature for studying.

These were some of the suggestions that were given from our first phase of user testing.

After reviewing the insightful critiques that our users from Team Puppy Squad gave us, our next step was to go through Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design. These broad guidelines served as a helpful tool to figure out what key features were missing and/or necessary that we have to make sure to fulfill in our finalized design.

First, our team members went over the list of heuristics individually and critiqued our initial prototype. Then as a group, we ordered the 10 heuristics in order of importance relative to our vocabulary app. We thought the most important was “Aesthetic and Minimalist Design” because our app strives for simplicity- it does one thing and does it well! The clean layout was what our users liked as well. So in our revised prototype, we decided to keep the minimalist design and only include the key features and icons on the home screen that we thought were necessary and important.

Below is a list of the remaining 9 heuristics with a few of our modified design decisions for each of them:

This is our main home screen of the application. We collected the data from our user testing and also used our heuristics mentioned above to decide on these features. We really focused on getting our application clean and simple: minimal as possible because that is the core of our application’s strength. People really preferred its clean look and wanted it to be that way.

From our user testing, it was mentioned that they wanted to know what this application entails so we added a little slogan in the sign up page. Also, gave an option to sign up with different emails since not everyone has Facebook or google. You also have an option to continue without an account.

From one of our heuristics, it is mentioned that having the user be aware of what they are doing and where they are currently essential, so we implemented a highlight on home-page to let them know the home tab is where they are at.

We also included options that prevent you from making errors. Such as warning sign and a help page in setting which you can look and see what to do and what not to do: also including Frequently Asked Questions section. As our user tester mentioned, if there is a log in/sign up button, there should be a sign out button so we included that in our setting page.

There were mixed reviews of having notification alert to remind users to study vocabulary, but we decided that this function should remain and users have the flexibility to turn it on or off. They also have the freedom of customizing how often they want to be reminded.

Furthermore…

After going over our revised prototype with Professor Boyle in class on Monday, we decided to make additional changes and incorporate some new ideas that would make our app more user friendly!

Well, that wrapped up the design process starting from creating our initial lo-fidelity prototypes and turning that into a more polished version using Balsamiq. With what we learned from performing the heuristic evaluations as well as what we gathered from our user feedback, we will take into creating our final and Exquisite design!

Final User Testing

Our final user testing helped us question our application from a different perspective. Before the final testing our application did not have a specific category that it would fit in. Our idea bounced from being a studying application that would have students as an audience or a leisure, self-help application, but why would we have flashcards? This question helped us find a better path for our application. We were able to say that our application is for both: students and vocabulary enthusiast. This finding reflects into our application by allowing the option to study to be subtle. People who don not want to study are not bombarded by notifications to study or a whole tab within our app that says “Study” which they would never click. Instead, we placed our option to study within a hamburger icon that allows for more options for a list.

Implementing the Final Prototype

The process of implementing our final prototype was interesting. We decided to take a step-by-step approach. The designers would brain storm, debate, and

criticize a specific characteristic of our application and once we all agreed on a decision, we passed that on to our coder for implementation. This led to an interesting dynamic because our coders would begin implementing but if some of our ideas were not realistic enough to be done in the time we had before the deadline, they would code something that was as close as possible and then the design team could reevaluate and consider other possible options. We decided to make the application visually simple because our main content is 100% text and having too many images or other types of distractions would take away from our goal: helping people learn new words.

Finally, the team was able to agree on the main pages of our application. The home screen would be the first thing a user would see, so we wanted our application to make a good first impression.

Therefore, we wanted the home screen to be the main hub of our application, where users would be able to access the core functionalities. Some of the core functionalities of our application included creating new lists, adding new words to lists, browsing for words, searching for words, and studying an entire list of words.

As a group, we learned about the extensive design process. We concluded that we did not know how deep and rich of steps this process was yet, it resulted in a nice break down to complete the project. We discussed that this process taught us that we must be ready to pivot on our preconceived notions of what we think the user would like. We think that as aspiring UX|UI Designers or software engineers it is very important to keep this in mind. Sometimes we can become stubborn with our decisions or ideals but we figured that working with a team, bouncing off ideas, and helping each other allowed us to deliver an exquisite project.

My Other September 11

Exquisite App

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