What I’d do differently next time.
CONCLUSION + Reflections
This was my first-ever passion UX project (Hooray)! 🎉. More than the final product, I’m immensely grateful to have been through an entire UX process. It was a a great opportunity to apply what I've learned from school and various mentors into a project that I am passionate about! On that note, a few things I’ve learned:
1. Iterate as much as you can. In the beginning phase of this project, it was important for me to try all possibilities of the design. It was never going to be right the first time, so it took many, many iterations and testing to eventually find a space that was validated through testing and amazing feedback. By no means, the final design is perfect, but from this, I've learned the importance of the iterating and feedback loop. Not to mention - I have a better sense to obey WCAG standards next time!
2. Focus more on tradeoffs with each direction. Something that I came to understand is that tradeoffs come in different scopes. During the project, I had to re-shift my focus on some design aspects that would better align with the user goals. Additionally, in a real-world project situation, trade-offs would also come in the form of product and engineering. I became aware of potential trade-off questions such as: "I changed the flow of this product/added multiple flows to adhere to different users now and/or later…" and "I pushed back on x because we don’t currently have the bandwidth to support the feature or we don’t have stuff built…".
3. Insight driven and storytelling. Despite weeks of research + development, my first version of this case study was full of unnecessary text at this stage instead of tying everything into the bigger question- “so how does this fit into the bigger picture”? Hence, I cut down the copy by more than 60% and focused on the major points in my project. With that being said, moving forward I believe focusing toward more so on the insights will improve my storytelling abilities to others.
4. You didn’t fail- you just found 100 ways that didn’t work. From noticing mistakes in my UI to uncovering more foundational UX problems in my app, I’m thankful to have constantly asked for feedback from my peers and my mentor. In the end, I pushed to have a featured design as best I could. I approached the design through the user's lens and tried my best to avoid my own biases.