City Mobility Research (Ironhack 2021 Chronicles)
Day 3 User Research Questions
My group and I had the pleasure of starting the research to address the issue of city mobility. As stated in a given brief, changes in transportation over time between rural areas and metropolitan areas. A particular area of concern is the increase in distraction from exercisers and the cleanliness of the city. It was the responsibility of my team to create an app that addresses these concerns,
Because this issue is a wicked problem, one with many problems and solutions, it was at first difficult to determine where to start in the design thinking process. As taught, the design thinking process first starts by defining the problem. This begins by developing a series of possible concerns. However, there is a fine line between identifying problems and making assumptions on behalf of the user. To avoid this problem, we first needed to determine what we needed to learn. Some of the main issues we needed to define were as followed:
- Who is traveling in the city?
- What are the type of exercises or activities that are possibly negatively impacting transportation?
- What are the types of transportation methods that are possibly negatively impacting transportation?
Day 6 Persona and Storyboarding
After conducting our survey and interviewing five individuals who commute to cities in their areas, we compiled our findings and insights into an affinity map. Through our affinity map, we discovered common user setbacks and solutions for commuting problems
With this insight, we created a persona based on the data and frustrations presented to us through our user research. Our persona helped us to empathize with our users.
Creating personas can be difficult to avoid the temptation of focusing too much on the topics and less on the goals and frustrations of the user. A user journey map helps us to further empathize with the user and determine the context in which our solution would likely be used. This user journey map was a result of creating user storyboards and compiling the data from users and the similarities amongst our storyboards.
Creating the user storyboards and user personas was not only a great opportunity to further empathize with the user, but also a great opportunity to connect with my teammates. We brought together our creativity and data-driven skills to connect with potential users.
Day 7 Creating the Low-Fi and Mid-Fi
Once we were able to understand the define user pain points and frustrations, we determined to address the user’s concern regarding construction that often leads to high traffic and commute delays. Our solution would be an app that provides information regarding city construction schedules. This solution will allow users to plan commutes in advance and avoid construction that may occur along their frequent routes.
Our low-fi sketches and mid-fi wireframes remained consistent in user flows and call to actions. However, after testing our low-fi sketches on Maze.com, we discovered user habits that led to users clicking on links that were not created for the user flow. Our mid-fi wireframes reflected those changes by including links related to the buttons we created.
Day 8 Conclusion
This project was a great opportunity to connect with members of my cohort as well as learn the design thinking process. A major lesson learned was the importance of avoiding assumptions and having detailed research questions. Our most time consuming portion of the project was having to re-evaluate our user journey map and How Might We questions to better define the problem and ideate more appropriate and relevant solutions. Overall, this was a great introductory project to introduce the design thinking process, a foundation discipline in UX/UI design. I look forward to future projects with Ironhack.
