My first foray into UX — The CoffeeHouse Project [Part 1]
-Empathize, Define, Ideate
Hello! Thanks for considering reading this blog, a little bit of intro — I am a final year CS engineering student whose had too many cups of coffee to realize that hard-core programming might not be her cup of tea and in exploring ways to escape from code and development environments, and working on figuring out my strengths, I stumbled upon the field of UX design.
Here’s part 1 of my first attempt at UX as I take you on a walk-through for an app for a fictional cafe called CoffeeHouse as an assignment for the Google’s Coursera course on UX design. This serves not only to show the work I’ve done on CoffeeHouse but to briefly document my learnings as I go.
This is only part 1 of the project and it’s main focus is gathering and arranging information — there’s a bunch of information given; about users, about the cafe and its policies, about the cafe’s main theme, so this blog details on arranging this information and gathering the points to focus on so that we can work on that in our app which is shown in part 2 blog of the project.
Step 1 — Empathize : Removing ‘I’
cecream, caterpllar, kng — the world would be a weird place without ‘i’ but as we start out in the field of UX design, maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all — By removing I, I mean forgetting for a bit what I want this app to do or what my expectations from an app designed for a cafe would be.
Instead our first and foremost task at hand is to identify “Who am I making this app for?” :
In the process of doing so, you’ll be conducting user research: you’ll establish the goals of your research, empathize with users and will attempt to articulate their pain points into problem statements using various tools [empathy maps, personas, user stories, user journey maps] for which solutions can then be drafted.
For the CoffeeHouse project, a summary of potential customers for the cafe was already provided to me from which I proceeded to develop the personas — these personas will act as the starting point based on which the app can be developed further.
Personas are a very powerful tool to start off our app because it sets the ground for the main focal point of our app: the user and consequentially, a number of other “tools” of articulating user research can be derived off of user personas such as :
- User stories
User stories serve as a nice “checklist” of all the things we need to pay attention to, a refocus of sorts so that we can narrow down on what exactly needs to be incorporated in the app.
User stories help us answer the question: What tasks need to be achieved by the user and why?
- User journey maps
User journeys offer an insight into the complete end-to-end process that a user undertakes in order to complete a specific task. By identifying each step in the user journey, one can gain key insights into What problem is the user facing? When is the user facing this problem? (and consequentially why he/she might be facing it?)
Long story short,
- Personas help us narrow down our users
- User stories help us understand what are the specific tasks that the user wants to achieve
- User journey maps help us identify how the user completes the task and the pain points/problems faced as the user sets out to complete the particular task
Step 2 — Define : I’ve got 99 problems and one problem statement is going to solve them all.
The next step as we get onto build our app is to identify — “Why am I building this app?” :
- What is my app aiming to solve?
- What is the difficulty that the user is facing and why?
“Problem statements encourage us to see users’ needs as verbs (that is, goals and end states) instead of nouns that describe solutions.”
Step 3 —Before we Ideate : Setting up the stage
Before we dive into brainstorming possible solutions for our problem at hand, it’s time to set the stage:
- Hypothesis statements — these help us to formulate the goals of our user into broad functionalities within the app. So in a way, it’s like forming a basis on which we can then start ideating on and experimenting with. Here we’ve expressed our hypothesis statement in the form of an If/Then statement.
- Ideation
Stage 1
Now comes the fun bit — to think of ideas and its the fun bit because there are no restrictions or constraints , you look at the problem statement and write every possible solution that pops into your head, even if it seems realistically implausible — in fact, it’s encouraged to come up with as many ideas as possible (putting quantity over quality, since this is the first step in ideation) to include a broad scope for solutions.
Now, before we proceed with this first stage of the ideation, we need to lay out the deliverables that will help us in stage 2 of ideation which is to narrow down the ideas we had in stage 1 ; we do know we have a lot of material pertaining to the user’s needs that we’ve curated(the user stories, personas, hypothesis statements etc.) which will help steer us in narrowinf down ideas but its also important to scope out ideas from a business point of view — how do we find the sweet spot between what a user needs and what results a business is expected to produce; one of the ways we can do this is through a competitive audit where you gauge your competition so that you can find ways to stand out to your user base.
Here are a few snippets from the competitive audit I’ve conducted using 2 competitors — Starbucks and McDonald’s (largely their McCafe segment). There are a bunch of things to consider while picking your competitors ; are they direct or indirect competitors? what is their business size? target audience etc.. ; the template provided by Coursera helped me understand what key areas to look into while conducting a competitive audit.
There were both value additions as well as gaps that I could identify from the competitive audit.
Now we get to play..err I mean work — ideate and ideate!
The goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible as discussed above, many designers find using ideation techniques a good way to innovate, 2 such techniques discussed in the coursera course were:
‘Crazy 8s’ and ‘How might we’. Out of these 2, my personal favorite is ‘Crazy 8s’ since it prodded me to think from multiple perspectives; we can think of solutions from a child’s lens , from the perspective of a fictional character, solutions if the problem statement were set in an alternate world and so on and so forth
This pretty much completes stage 1 of the ideation where you have a few specific problem statements and many many random, predictable, out-of-the-box, conventional and unconventional ideas. Now to use our tools above to help us narrow down ideas in Stage 2..
Stage 2:
Considering our real-life environment, user personas, UX journey maps and our competitive audit, we now slowly start scratching out the ideas that would not work — as we do this, we ask ourselves, is there more data we need from the user that is crucial for us in deciding which ideas we must proceed with? we can then go back to tweaking our user research - UX design is an iterative process and so re-visiting “earlier” stages is all part of the journey.
At the end of the ideation process, I could come up with some plausible ideation solutions that I attempted to showcase in these hand-drawn wireframes for the app(please refer to the google drive link in references for the complete set of wireframes as well as detailed ideation notes):
And that’s it for part 1! I hope you liked this documentation series for the CoffeeHouse app so far and if you’re interested further, please check out part 2 of this blog series to see an analysis of the working prototype of the app.
If there’s any feedback, inputs or you’d just like to start a discussion on what you think of this blog, please feel free to comment and let me know, thank you!
Summary -
- Empathizing with users allows you to consider the product experience from the users’ perspective. By connecting with people directly, like through interviews, you can discover and understand users’ likes, dislikes, and pain points.
- There are various ways or “tools” which help you to identify users, express and document what you’ve learnt from them about their experiences and problems that the app you’re designing can then work on solving
- Then, sort through research you collected about users to define the problem they’re facing. Creating a problem statement helps you clearly define the user pain points that your future designs can address.
- Now that you’ve defined the problem, ideate and think of possible solutions to the problem, use all the information you’ve gathered as part of the empathize and define stages to narrow down your set of ideas into plausible solutions.
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