1. Task 1: Persona
Brief
Based on your research from last week, develop a persona for your UX prototype. Include the following elements:
Name and portrait
Bio and demographics
Behaviours and frustrations
Needs and goals
User story/scenario
I began by roughly drawing out the layout for a persona described in the video content this week on an A3 pad. The research I had done the previous week seemed to indicate two different types of users, one which was highly transient and had difficulty committing to volunteer opportunities due to time but felt a disconnect from their local community and one that wanted to explore volunteering opportunities that would allow them to utilise their current skills and gain new ones. I called these two personas Tom and Phil respectively as I only had data on men, due to my attempts to focus on Roundtables demographics in week 2 as a way of framing the research.
I added Post-IT notes with the outline of each of the two personas (figure 1) and created higher fidelity versions in Photoshop later (figure 2, figure 3).
The personas were based on the problem statements from last week's challenge:
Volunteers who spend extended periods away from their local community need an easy way to contribute small amounts of time to volunteering with local causes.
Volunteers need to feel they are gaining additional benefits from their volunteering.
Volunteers need a way to see where they can contribute and how that contribution makes a difference.
The Primary Persona, Phil was based on the second and third problem statements, whereas the secondary persona, Tom was based on the first point. As such I will approach the development of the artefact with Phil primarily in mind, ensuring when I incorporate elements for Tom that they do not contradict Phil's needs.
1.1 Feedback
Gareth Gave some good feedback in the Spark forum this week regarding the persona for Tom and again reiterated the Pomodoro technique to really keep things disciplined, as he felt there may be too much information for a first draft. He suggested a 20 min person. So with my Pomodoro time arriving today in the post (a wonderfully 80's looking contraption that makes me feel like a creative at the Alessi kitchenware studio) (figure 4), I have no excuse to set the following smart goal:
SMART Goal:
To ensure the next time I produce a persona I am disciplined to only 20 mins and. rely on more cliche and shortcuts to communicate the situation they find themselves in.
2. Task 2: User Flow
Brief
Using software like Miro or Whimsical create a user flow for an online experience you have this week. For example:
Making a payment / checking your balance in online banking
Signing up for a new product or service
Ordering a take out from Deliveroo
Or any other example.
Only include the sign-in journey if you think it is interesting: maybe it is overly complicated? Maybe it happens too fast? Maybe there is no loading state?
Tips:
Pick an entry point (eg ‘logging in’ to a service, or ‘starting a search’ in a product) and an exit / success point (eg receiving payment or confirmation)
Start by stating a clear user goal.
Following the course, content on user follows I attempted to recreate one based on my interactions with the Lloyds Bank app. I usually hold this app in pretty high regard as I find it easy and intuitive to navigate and manage my finances. I decided that I would focus on the process of paying another account a sum of money, as this was a fairly straightforward process which I do on a semi-regular basis. This time I dived straight into Miro and bypassed the paper phase (figure 6). Miro has a bunch of pre-formatted options for creating these kinds of diagrams, so it wasn't surprising to find a flow diagram in the list.
The flow was fairly quick to create. I was only slightly surprised by the number of steps it took to make a payment transfer, it was a bit higher than expected but not after a second glance. Many of my fellow coursemates had done much more elaborate onboarding processes and had added pain points and observations which I felt was a nice touch and something I would do the next time I undertake one. I felt the process was easy and clear enough to add to my future workflow without causing too much disruption and I like how the challenge activity asked us to practice on an app that already existed, as appose to the concept, so I could focus on the techniques and get in the mindset, rather than obsess about getting the perfect flow.
SMART Goal:
To add pain points and thoughts the next time I create a user flow.
3. Task 3: Competitive analysis
Brief
Make a list of three or more competitors/comparators in the problem area for your brief.
Choose one of the competitor research methods to analyse your competitors.
Then choose one element or feature you want to analyse.
Research how your list of competitors/comparators handles your chosen element.
Develop a conclusion for the development of your project based on your findings.
Not having used any volunteering apps myself I wasn’t sure where to begin. My volunteering experience with the Roundtable consisted of WhatsApp to communicate upcoming events and within the group and email correspondence for communication when there was a need for more information or attachments. It was becoming increasingly clear to me from the research that the artefact needed to allow casual users to see opportunities to utilise their skills in the local community, with a way of also seeing how they could use the experience to gain additional skills. Furthermore, there needed to be a way for users to volunteer their time in a “digital only” way, something I hadn’t really explored as a concept yet. Was this even a thing, and if so what could that look like?
I actually asked ChatGPT for suggestions on apps as I felt that a google search may return too many irrelevant results and I wanted to explore the subject in a conversational manner. I’ve experimented with ChatGPT for work and have found it eerily useful, having asked for ways to improve my company's customer journey. Although some of the suggestions were somewhat fanciful, there was also a lot of interesting suggestion. This meant that when it came to this challenge it immediately sprang to mind. ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI and can understand and respond to natural language questions. It’s been hailed as revolutionary because it has the ability to generate human-like responses, making it a powerful tool for a wide range of applications such as translation, conversation, writing assistance, and research. The ethical implications mean it’s difficult to know where one should resist the opportunity to use it. Having it write a research paper is obviously plagiarism as is citation generation. Research is more of a grey area, particularly as a point of entry, I don’t agree with using it to conduct scholarly research or citation but as a starting point, I felt less precious although I couldn’t say why. Perhaps it's because I know the bulk of the follow-up research would be undertaken in the traditional manner, and I was asking for suggestions for apps, rather than theory or referencing (figure 6, figure 7)
From the suggestions that ChatGPT produced, many were US-only, showing it has a clear bias. But I was able to get three sensible suggestions, Two apps for my comparison - DoIT and Golden, and one website called Volunteer Match.
DoIT - is a volunteering app that connects volunteers with local charities and community groups. You can search for opportunities by location and cause.
Golden Volunteer Opportunities - Find nonprofit opportunities in your city that fit your schedule and are based on your hobbies and personal preferences.
Volunteer Match - This app is designed to connect volunteers with nonprofit organizations in their local area. You can search for volunteer opportunities by cause, location, and organization.
3.1 Features Inventory
I began by doing a Features Inventory, of each (Figure 8)
Golden and Volunteer both appeared to have a focus on the organiser more so than DoIT, which seemed to be more socially oriented and focused on the volunteer. The inventory revealed that Golden had more options to tailor the experience upfront than the other two and have some limited gamification function in the guise of Karats (which were basically points and badges), as well as deep influences which was a form of status building. Volunteer Match, was the only one of the three not to have an app but was also the only one that had features related to existing skills and the desire to match those to volunteer opportunities.
3.2 Task Analysis
Similar to the User flow, I decided to focus on one part that all the apps/websites had in common, the search for opportunities to volunteer, and created the results in Miro (figure 9). A breakdown can be seen in figure 10, figure 11, and figure 12 as it was too much information to show in figure 9.
3.2.1 Conclusion of Task Analysis
This exercise was insightful; all three search functions had many more steps than I had anticipated. There were deficiencies in all of them, predominantly stemming from the same issue which was Feedback - the system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time (Nielsen, 1994:156). DoIT did not show any updates upon searching on my iOS app on my iPhone and showed no indication of any change to the system… I simply typed and nothing appeared to happen. In actuality, the results were updated in real-time, but further down, off the bottom of the screen. This could have been avoided if there was a loading indicator or if the section updating was on screen at the same time. Once you closed the OS keyboard, the results were there, but it wasn’t clear these related to your search you couldn’t see the real-time update they’d obviously worked hard to implement. Only after a second search and some scrolling did the connection between the search and where the “results” were made sense. This disconnect also violates the Gestalt principle of the Law of Proximity (Yablonski, n.d) as the input/output did not share a common region when the keyboard was open.
Volunteer Match had the opposite problem, where every option you selected in the form updated the preview. This was evident as I was looking on a laptop so I had more screen real estate to see the updates but I found the content refresh distracting and I kept scrolling down to see the changes before finalizing my search criteria. I did however appreciate the granularity of search options available, which wasn’t present in the other two solutions.
Golden had the fewest steps to search, but this was at the expense of options and filters available, there were also small UX issues such as the search field not being preselected on a screen where it was the primary (and only) action to take and the awkwardness of pinching and zooming into a terms and conditions PDF document previewer before signup.
Takeaways include preselecting search where appropriate, only loading content once the user is done searching, and showing results straight away in a location the user doesn’t have to second guess. Basically, respect the usability heuristic “Visibility of system status”. I would also like to incorporate the ability to filter the search based on skills needed and potential skills acquired in the search functionality of my artefact, similar to Volunteer Match.
References
Lloyds Banking Group. n.d. Lloyds Bank Mobile Banking (Version 10901) [Mobile application software]. Retrieved from https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/lloyds-bank-mobile-banking/id469964520
NIELSEN, Jakob. 1994. ‘Enhancing the Explanatory Power of Usability Heuristics’. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 152–8.
OpenAI. 2023. GPT-3 Language Model. Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/
YABLONSKI, Jon. n.d. ‘Law of Proximity, Laws of UX’.[online] Available at: https://lawsofux.com/law-of-proximity/[accessed: 06/02/23].
Figures
Figure 1: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Rough drafts of personas using post-it notes
Figure 2: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Primary user persona Phil
Figure 3: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Secondary user persona Tom
Figure 4: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. My Pomodoro Timer
Figure 5: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. User Flow for making a payment on Llyods App
Figure 6: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Chat GPT offering suggestions for Volunteering Apps
Figure 7: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Chat GPT offering suggestions for UK Volunteering websites and apps
Figure 8: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Feature Inventory of competitors
Figure 9: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Task Analysis overview for Competitors
Figure 10: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Task Analysis for DOIT
Figure 111: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Task Analysis for Golden
Figure 12: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Task Analysis for Volunteer Match
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