IBM design sprint
Event: I had the opportunity to participate in a Design Sprint with a team of 7, in partnership with IBM.
Each team had five days to design a solution for an identified problem inspired by one of three sample user personas. IBM’s Senior Design Lead David Burdreau and Senior UX Designer Dan Silveira judged the event
Challenge:
Improve the experience of Coastal University students when collaborating as members of virtual teams both in school and work related project.
Brand: Your solution must be designed using Avenir as the primary font and reflect the primary brand colours.
Accessibility: Your solution needs to be accessible to the widest audience; thus must be WCAG AA compliant.
Role: Product Designer Team: Adad Salloum, Yara Bagh, Natalie Soberano, Cindy Wu, Leo Mikulich, Makeda Semeneh Platform: Android Time Frame: 5 days Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop
Problem Space
What is the problem?
The Problem
Collaborating experience of Coastal University students lacks an efficient method when working as members of virtual teams both in school and work related projects.
Current Landscape
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a shift to online learning. Stats Canada noted that 57% of post-secondary students had some sort of academic interruption due to Covid-19. Students started to rely heavily on video calls, online chats, and emails which became their main form of communication.
From December of last year to Zoom’s peak usage in April, daily users have increased from 10 million to 300 million during the pandemic.
We made 4th year students our target demographic as we learned they had difficulties transitioning from in person to remote learning.
Our Goal
Project Objective
To explore how digital technologies can be leveraged to completely reimagine a final-year student’s education experience.
What do we want to achieve?
To assist graduating students and young professionals in order to improve their remote environment by enhancing collaboration opportunities.
Competitive Analysis
Analyzed 3 competitors about online collaboration tools (Zoom, Trello, Slack)
What we learned:
Zoom has Video or audio calls, screen sharing and group video conferences.
Trello is a visual organization tool allows for task tracking and collaboration.
Slack provides project and team shared channels, direct messages, notifications and calling.
User Interviews & Insights
The goal of the interviews were to dig deeper into the behaviours, motivations and pain points of young professionals to gather experiences and thoughts about online collabration, and to understand common misunderstandings and why they take place.
The objective is to extract insights in order to develop a primary persona that would guide our design and solution process.
In our interviews, participant Lori said: “The remote learning experience has been very tough for me. I have no motivation and a lack of student community. We only use zoom and email, but it's not the same and I have no access to campus resources”
Empathy Map
From our users we learned they were feeling isolated, learning from home. They are anxious about their success at school and future in the workforce. They are feeling stressed and unorganized around coordinating schedules.
Primary Persona
Who are we building this product for?
Using the interview insights, we developed a primary persona to help solidify the target users needs, behaviours, experiences and challenges. This could then be referenced moving forward to ensure that my design decisions were aligned with our user.
DESIGN QUESTION
How Might We optimize scheduling for students and professionals in order to improve collaboration opportunities?
Ideate
Explore potential features and solutions
Task Selection
What does this application do?
Thinking about both the HMW question and my primary persona, we created a products value proposition to help determine the core functionalities of what should be included within the app.
Core Value Proposition
To improve the overall experience of online scheduling and collaboration for students.
User stories
we created a set of 20 user stories based on the primary persona to meet the needs of her goals and find a solution of her frustrations. These stories will reflect specific features and functionality users might expect from a digital solution.
Task Flow
This task flow shows the user schedules new meeting with his colleagues and professors.
Ideation Sketches
Based on my user findings, user stories and task flow diagram, we sketched out different ideas for possible solutions while staying aligned with our task flow.
Then we chose the most compelling one to convert it into a digitized version.
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Test
Turn the wireframes into a working prototype and begin user testing in order to reach a desirable product outcome
Usability Testing
Identifying and solving usability issues
We conducted 5, 30 minute user test sessions on students and young professionals.
insights
For our dashboard screen the feedback was minimal. Changes were made to solve friction that was easily overcome by the user. Moreover, users thought that the “add members” page was intuitive in searching and adding but were confused by our tabular navigation - the term “university” was ambiguous - was it anyone at the university or only staff? Users also felt that the final screen had inconsistencies with the date pickers and that the available times looked uninteractive.
Some notable changes
Visual Design
Defining the brand values and visual identity, and creating the final prototype version
Brand Identity
Brand colours and typography was given by IBM, we created a simple logo and injected the colours we were given to the final wire-flow which was modified according to the user testing.
Final High Fidelity Prototype
Putting it all together
To view the final prototype and finished product please click the button below.
Future Thinking
Next Steps & Key Learning
What’s next for Bookit! ?
We believe that by creating a scheduling app that encompasses communication and organization for young professional students we achieve our goal of enhancing collaborative opportunities.
If we had the chance for another sprint, we would like to continue to move forward with features to accommodate longer meeting times and further develop the project creation flow by adding tasks. We would also develop for IOS users.
Thanks!