ux-Pickup

Phase II: Refining interaction and designing wireframes

Introduction

In this phase, we focused on refining and honing in on the main idea of an app to find people to play games with. We found that before phase 2 we didn’t really have a good idea as to what our product was going to look like not only for us, but for consumers as well. We want to find something clean but unique from other products. Besides this, we need a lot of user feedback for our designs and ideas of what Pickup should be. We are constantly going in between being a primarily sports app and being a full fledged app for everything “Gaming”. We are also trying not to clutter the interface or make it too complex to use, especially if we are an all-inclusive app for everything gaming. There would be many options for those who want just sports and those who wish to just virtual/tabletop gaming.

Methods

We conducted more research on users during this sprint to improve our project further. In the last phase, we focused on Competitive Analysis, which involved three users, and Heuristic Evaluation, which also involved three users, to research. In this phase, we used a Cognitive Walkthrough, which involved five users, and Informal Feedback, which involved 65 users. By increasing our user base, we increased input to get more valuable feedback.

Cognitive walkthrough took users step by step through our wireframe documentation so the UX team could see any confusion that may arise. Ensuring the user knows where to go for each step without asking for help is necessary to make the product efficient, satisfying, and effective. The users provided feedback on what was easy to do and what questions arose from using the wireframes.

Informal feedback was another helpful method, as it had a large user base that gave various opinions. Developers asked a class full of Software Engineering students what they would like the website to have and what features stood out from the competition. The answers to these questions were returned as feedback for the UX team to discuss during this sprint phase.

Findings

• Cognitive Walkthrough: The feedbacks from the cognitive walkthrough are primarily positive, aside from some missing features that have not been implemented yet.
• Informal Feedback: The testers for our product strongly recommend that we include a sorting/filtering feature into our app, so that they can find what they want more efficiently. The testers also suggested the use as labels and adding requirements as options for each of the posts they make.
• Filters
• Filter by time and location -Location near me, then being able to filter timeslot
• Filter by event type.
• Labeling for each box in each posts
• Adding requirements to post
• Min/max of people for an event
• Adding a calendar function to the user profile to be able to filter out events that are during classes/work, like when2meet, but only show the posts that work in your time frame
• Competitive Analysis: By analyzing similar apps from our potential competitors, we found out that they generally aim for a similar audience as us, but their UX was not intuitive enough for people to fully resolve problems if the user has no prior UX knowledge or entered the wrong input.
• Heuristic Evaluation: Our competitor has many flaws when it comes to their UX design which leads to a lot of confusion if information is not input correctly into their required fields.

Conclusions

Users appreciated our initial wireframe designs, especially the aesthetics, which they found clean and visually appealing. This validation gave us more insight into the importance of maintaining a streamlined, user-friendly design as we move forward. Analyzed competitor products, identifying clear strengths and weaknesses, allowing us to integrate features while addressing potential downfalls before it is too late. This approach ensures our product continues with a best-practice mindset without inheriting common problems. It is understood that we need clearer goals. To refine our vision, we will focus on solidifying our objectives and developing more in-depth User Stories. With a clearer direction, we can resolve some of the cloudiness that still looms over our target focus, whether we should cater exclusively to sports or expand to include board and video gaming.

Caveats

• A limitation of our testing is the fact that the testing of our cognitive walkthroughs are within the classroom, so the range of the audience is very limited.
• Also, since the audience available for the testing is all in the same classroom, which can have a lot of bias mentally on how to navigate the app already.