General Assembly UX Design Final Project
For 10 weeks, I attended a UX/UI Design course during the evenings at General Assembly in Washington, D.C. Throughout the 10-week course, we learned a series of different skills and knowledge that helped contribute to a final project. This here is my final project from the course and my very first UX project.
What is the problem?
Often times, when people meet on online dating apps, there is an unnecessary and sometimes stressful pressure of choosing the right place to meet for a date. To get rid of this pressure, the PEAR app is designed where both people can answer a series of questions where their answers will be calculated to determine the top 3 locations for them. Some of these questions will focus on their location, food preference, cost, and many more.
The Interview
For the interview process, I selected four people to ask questions to learn more about how users use online dating apps to see what are some problems users face. I tried to stay in the 20-30 age range since this is the largest demographic of online dating app users; however, if given the time, I wish I expanded my interview to reach older and younger groups. By asking them a series of questions to understand the user’s experience, I was able to group the problems: difficulty in choosing, pressure in choosing, and a lack of resources for researching date ideas.
PERSONAS
For this project, I created two personas differing in the way a person might use and need this app. For one person, they could be someone who is constantly searching for the latest trends and places to go which this app could be a useful resource. The other person might be someone who is more comfortable going to the same place, but might need resources for planning a date.
RESEARCH
For the research portion, I chose to do a competitor analysis to compare different features available in similar apps. This method of research helped me to determine what other apps are focusing on or missing that could make my app more practical and useful. I also chose the feature priority and question priority to determine what features were most important for me since this was a 10-week project.
USER FLOW
During my first user flow draft, I thought about including the app to create a food filter as well as an activity filter where users can choose date activities instead of just restaurant locations. Given the time limit of this project, I ended up simplifying the user flower to focus more on the user’s goal of selecting a location where both people going on the date is happy with. The app starts off with the creation of a new date where both parties are asked a series of questions to determine which restaurant location is best for both people.
SITE MAP
Before jumping into designing my prototypes, I created a sitemap to help organize my ideas. Creating a site map before designing my prototype helped me to have direction when designing the different slides. I’ve drawn several site maps until I’ve come to this final site map design, but can’t find the napkins I drew them on…
PROTOTYPE
For my first prototype, I started with a low level paper prototype where I asked my classmates to tell me and participate in playing with the paper app. This process helped me to see if the user would be able to successfully maneuver and reach their user flow goal. Once I received some helpful tips and feedback, I was able to go into Sketch to design a mid-level prototype.
USABILITY TEST
Using the mid-level prototype, I was able to perform a usability test with my classmates as well as some friends who were currently using online dating apps. Asking people to actually test out the mid-level prototypes helped me to understand the following:
FINAL PROTOTYPE
After completing the usability test, I was able to take everything I learned to edit the high-level prototype including a new dietary restriction page. There’s still a lot of changes I can make since there was a limit to time as well as the number and range of people I interviewed, but this is the final product of my UX Design project.