Raitis Linde

Roadmap of our UX project

As the last course of our first master’s semester, we were allowed to choose our own project that reflects our interests. Even though I am coming from computer science background, I felt that I lacked enough chances to do a user research . That’s why I decided to design a User Experience (UX), because this involves large spectrum of work related to users and visual design. As a bases we (me and my teammate Jia) used a structure created by Jesse James Garrett.

In a 3 week period that we had, we wanted to plan a collaborative creative writing website and felt that this UX structure can help us to structure our way forward.

1. User needs and requirements

Mind maps and personas

We started by brainstorming sessions with people in Latvia and China who are interested (and have experience) in creative writing. There we were able to determine general attitude towards idea, and we got a lot of useful ideas as well which we categorized in form of mind map diagrams with a FreeMind software which is quite easy to use (even though we were making mind maps for the first time). It was quite useful to put these on a wall for making decision of features and form of website. In my case I conducted a brainstorming session in Skype (because I was in Denmark at that time). In the beginning I was afraid if textual environment (Skype chat) will be enough to understand each other and if this space will be encouraging to share thoughts. However, it appeared to be a nice brainstorming, definetly longer than 30 minutes I planned in the beginning. And people were actually able to understand each other, argue for idea, and provide valuable inputs on idea.

We conducted also a competitor research which contributed a lot to our idea. Even more, there actually were some experiments going on about collaborative writing like A million penguins project. Comments of participators gave us also a good insight on collaborative writing and user needs.

2. Video scenarious

Website wireframe

In a first step we have got general ideas for our website. By many user inputs we have got, we were actually able to create 4 main user groups, that resulted in different personas. As I noticed later, these personas did a great job in helping to make decisions like “Would these people use a story commenting feature?”. In the same time we created wireframes of most important webpages like frontpage, user account page, read a story page etc.

After that we wanted to do a more detailed user inquiry. In order to do that, we needed to show them what we have got until this time. So we decided to make these personas alive – make a video of different use cases (relevant for each persona) using wireframes that we have created. As an inspiration for videos we took a Paper Prototype scenario for Restaurant Tablet menu available on Youtube.

3. Detailed user inquiry

As we still learned throught this project, we searched an internet for inspiration in user research field. We have found a great resource of User Experience Research method comparison by Jakob Nielsen. By taking account our time limit and possible outcome, we chose to show video scenarious to the same people we had on brainstorming and ask them to fill out more detailed inquiry. For creating a detailed inquire we also have found a source of inspiration.

Results gave us impression on which features would be most important on our collaborative writing website. We also got some fresh understanding on how people would use it.

4. Final thoughts

Even though we didn’t manage to go through all User Experience stages, I felt that we have got a good insight on the User Experience field. It is a fun and pleasure to work with people, as there are unexpected and surprising output. However, it requires some work to open people’s mind and get non-trivial responses.