Use your learnings from this class to design a digital experience that helps your target audience!

ASSIGNMENT

Pick an app you’d like to improve OR a problem you want to help solve, then go through a simple version of the user-centered design process. Upload your results here.

1. Persona

Create a persona of your target user using the persona generation template. If you're having trouble, try looking at potential competitors in the problem space. See if you can define their customers. If possible, create journey maps for those experiences by listing out each necessary task and the emotions you felt while going through them. Compare and contrast this information with your idea of a target user.

If you want a more accurate persona, try conducting some user research via interviews or online surveys. You can do something as simple as a Twitter poll. Remember these tips if you do research:

Talk about the simple stuff.
Ask open-ended questions.
Avoid leading questions.
Consider the unspoken.
The customer is always right.

Once you've created the persona, write one user goal statement for them (for example, "I want to confidently send a message to my intended audience"). Upload the persona and user goal statement to your project.

2. Experience principles

Do word generation exercise for your project. Take 15 minutes to answer the following questions:

What words summarize the experience you want to create for your persona?
What should your persona feel while using your product?
What are some words that do not describe your ideal product experience?

Once you've finished generating words, create 4–6 experience principles. Add these principles to your project.

3. Ideation

Based on your user goal, do a 10-minute HMW session. Set a timer and create at least 5 “how might we” (HMW) statements. Next, take 10 minutes to write at least 5 feature ideas — one idea to answer each of your HMWs. Share the results on your project.

4. Sketching

Sketch for 10 minutes. Draw at least 1 example of a feature idea you came up with. Upload your favorite(s) to your project.

WANT TO DO MORE?

Run 20-minute tests with 5 users. Let them rate each idea from 1 (least useful) to 5 (most useful).
Turn your highest-rated sketch into a visual design. Make a design for each necessary step. Turn them into a clickable prototype using the program of your choice.
Conduct at least five usability tests with your prototype, then share your results here.

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RESOURCES

Research

Nielsen Norman Group https://www.nngroup.com
Baymard https://baymard.com

Templates

Persona generation: https://cattsmall.com/assets/files/2018/cattsmall-persona-template.pdf
Sketching: https://cattsmall.com/assets/files/2018/cattsmall-sketching_worksheets.pdf

Colors

Adobe Color CC https://color.adobe.com

Fonts

Adobe Fonts http://fonts.adobe.com
Google Fonts http://fonts.google.com

Prototyping

Adobe XD: https://www.adobe.com/products/xd.html

Online usability testing

If you're a fan of reading about UX, I also wrote a blog post with advice for new UX designers!

Kemberly Eliscar

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