Introduction:
Our group — S.H.E.O.F.F. an acronym for all our initials — focused on the creation of an exchange platform for skill swapping. As a group of 5 UX designers in the making, we launched ourselves into the experience of creating an app that allows people to easily swap skills. From research to prototyping, we went through an exciting journey of learning.
When we started this project, we focused on the question “Is there a way to help people connect with others and easily exchange goods/services/etc?”. Several of our initial ideas focused on the same principle: how do we help people connect with others in order to get free service?
Our top ideas included a platform to swap skills and a platform to swap food. In the end, we decided to focus on the creation of a skill exchange platform that connects people who are looking to exchange “skills”. The app would be based on the simple principle of reciprocity, meaning that people looking to learn a new skill would search, connect and swap a skill with the intention of teaching a new skill themselves.
Our ultimate decision was based both on personal interest — we thought it was a cool idea! — and we all would like to build something helpful in connecting people & helping them learn new skills for free. We focused on the idea of creating a fun user experience on a mobile app and exploring the features which can create a pleasant & self-explanatory experience for users.
Methodology:
Ideation and research
Since we had several ideas in mind, we started our journey with an Ideation workshop. We got together to narrow and vote our main idea. The problem? It was still too broad for us to start researching. That’s why our mentor Felix decided to help us with an ideation alignment workshop to help us decide what exactly we wanted to solve and to narrow down the problem. The next steps included a Why/How Laddering to further shape our problem and to iterate on the solution path at an early stage, as well as a 5 Why’s workshop to further narrow down the root cause of our problem.
Once we had defined our problem and narrowed everything down, we created our first proto-persona : Sven. Based on the results and our quick design using the crazy 8 method, we created our first wireframes.
Afterward, we dived deeper into research: from user testing with the lo-fi wireframes, benchmarking, competitor analysis, and qualitative surveys to user interviews. It was quite a difficult process as it was hard to find the “right users” and because of some flaws in our questionnaire, therefore we were not extremely happy with the result of the target group: expats between 20 and 40 years old. In the end, we decided to include some details from the findings in our personas but also included some that we hypothetically assumed would fit our right users. In a perfect case scenario, more research on users using different methods would be helpful, like diary method.
In the last stage of this phase and once we had gathered our research results, we created and selected 3 new personas.
Information Architecture/ Design rationale
Once we had finished defining our problem, created the necessary tools, and did the research, we then focused on designing artifacts and did a QOC (Questions, Options, Criteria) Design Rationale for our design.
We then proceeded to create a user journey mapping based on the three personas we had created. As a result, we then made low-fi wireframes for our final app design.
As the next step, we gathered together for another workshop to decide the main design aspects that we would be focusing on. For this we used the Moscow Method to prioritize problems to solve as in the short time we had available, it wouldn’t be possible to deliver a final product with all features that would be useful for the user. We decided to focus on the matchmaking process between our users, as we decided it was the core part of our user experience.
To complete all the information and basic designs we had, we concluded it was necessary to do more visual design benchmarking and research for visual designs.
Wireframing / Prototyping
We started by making wireframes and comparing them to our research before proceeding with the creation of our last prototypes. Along the process, prototyping was always present, but during the last phase, we decided to focus on the creation of real working prototypes and on our UI library.
“Divide and conquer” is the right expression to define the last step of our journey. Our group decided to split the tasks in order to speed up the process. As a result, one group focused on the user writing and wireframes, while the second group focussed on prototyping our 4 final pages in Figma.
In the end, we compared our prototypes, made the last final design decisions and created a Figma prototype.
Learning Journey:
We believe it was an overall great experience. We had a committed group of team members that constantly attended weekly meetings and delivered results. We met once a week for the past months, usually online, but we particularly loved our in-person meetings at the Speicherstadt. It was interesting to meet and work with people from different backgrounds that shared one common interest: to learn UX design.
We may have had one mentor change, but it was perhaps for the best. Felix guided us throughout the whole journey, he was always there when we needed him also in-person or remote, he recommended material and made workshops to help and guide us through the UX journey. He was the best mentor that a beginner could hope for.
Additionally, we cooperated with Group 13 (the web dev team), with whom we decided to do a partial collaboration. We met online once per 2 weeks to exchange ideas and experiences and tried to get an inside from the coding part of the website/app creation.
