Overview

The Project: Design an app that solves a problem for the client Liv, and makes something easier in her life.

The Client: The user Liv is an eclectic girl with a lot of passion for art, archeology and psychology. She is from London and she is very busy during the week.

Discovery and Research

Through a deep interview I created multiple concept maps to understand better her attitude and behaviour, her correlations and what she are her priorities.

Participatory Design/Sketches/User Flows

She talked about how much she struggles during the week to find something interesting to do at the week end. For her is very important to use her free time in satisfying activities that would keep her mind awake and reactive. After a busy week full of work commitments and much more she never makes it to plan interesting activities for her weekend and she is so over it.
She doesn’t want to spend another weekend she has to be content with or getting bored at home.
She never has time or patience to search among the endless offers available in town, to decide which of them can be the most interesting and how to schedule these activities during the week. I also found out that she uses apps frequently, and she loves shaking the phone to change offer or say “no”.

Her needs:
-find offers in the city
-choose something close to her
-something she likes
-convenient
-and she doesn’t want to plan that
- create an itinerary
-and she can’t create an efficient itinerary for the weekend

The user flows helped me to understand the structure of the app as well as all the interactions. I created a storyboard to speculate what might be her attitude and to see how her reaction could be in a standard Saturday morning, in order to run some user testing and see if my idea would help solve her problem. Also to discover what would be the most useful functions.

I created a sketch imaging that the user can set her profile with a simple bubble game. The following page asks her more information about the company (how many people she would like to go with), time and place of the meeting. After that, a simple calendar will create a combination of offers for her. The user will be able to hold the activities she considers interesting and change the others by shaking her phone.

Changes and Improvement

I collected all the feedback from the user and realised in the app there was not only too much information but also too much request. So I cleaned all the steps to make the decision easier and faster. Nonetheless there were also some redundancies. If the User wanted to get further information on an offer he had just selected he had to click again on the (i) button. I made it possible that by selecting the offer you would get further information already and I replaced the (i) button with a paper basket to trash the offer in case the User was not interested. As for the second button right under the paper basket, the function remained untouched but I changed the pattern to make it easier and quicker and giving the opportunity to go back to the offers main page.

Usability testing, interactions an prototyping

I tested the product loading it on popapp so to try it on the device and better understand the problems and the users’ requests. For the test I gave users a paper saying only what would be the button “shake your phone” and the various tasks they were to follow.

Paper Prototype

During the test all the tasks were done very easily and troubleless. All the requests of the users were on the Social, so how would they share their itinerary and if it were possible to read other users’ feedbacks and comments on the same offers.

Future additions

What I have in mind is to add buttons to share the itinerary and make this app more like a social app. Furthermore, a typical 5 star option will be added to rate the offer and leave a comment.