Case Study
In this case study, ReminderX is a startup software company planning to build and launch an intuitive to-do list and reminder app for college students on both iPhone and Android phones. This application will be developed to be more user-friendly and effective during the workflow process. In order to increase the adoption and engagement of their app, the company has decided to gather more in-depth information about users’ experiences using the current reminder apps available in the market. They aim to design their application based on the findings from the user experience research.
Category
UX/UI Design
Design Research
Research Collaborator
The Goal
The goal of the project is to gain insights from the target users and apply those insights to develop the application to be more usable and useful. The goal of the research is to generate answers to the following questions:
• What is target users' context of use?
• What is their goal and desire?
• How are users’ onboarding experiences?
• What are the users' difficulties in adopting the app? or to perform the app?
• What are the users’ needs for functionality and features?
The Process
The process of solving problems can be varied depending on each different project and it will be determined by many factors such as the project goals, business needs, complexity of the problem, time and etc. For this particular project, the team required the steps of research, ideation, design, and test. The entire process was developed in this order to fulfill the aim of the project, to better understand and serve the users.
Research
Ideation
Design
Test
Research
Conducted in person interviews and analysis of competitor apps to determine what aspects were desired and how the current options were fulfilling or not fulfilling those needs. The available information was reviewed and sorted into the needs that were most important to the users and the most prominent difficulties while using reminder apps.
Research Approach
The goals of the user research were to gain knowledge of users' wants and needs for a reminder app, as well as to understand the difficulties of accessing or using the current Apple Reminder application.
Thus, the objectives were:
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Classify the context of users.
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Investigate users' desires and goals for using a reminder.
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Identify areas of difficulty in adopting the reminder app or performing tasks within the app.
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Extract recommendations for addressing the identified issues.
Findings and Recommendations
The Reminder X app is aimed to be utilized by the specific target audience of college students. The interviews were conducted with participants from this audience. The participants interviewed did utilize reminders in the form of other applications or writing physical messages, such as sticky notes or planners. Most of the participants mentioned that with digital reminders they want to categorize to-do tasks according to home/school/work. When all the tasks are shown together they found it easy to become mixed up, since it is sometimes difficult to oversee when there are too many tasks to do. Thus, it would be helpful if tasks are organized into a category.
The participants also talked about the difficulties of using the default app in the phone for a to-do list, which were derived from the difficulties of writing/typing in the phone and navigating how to use the app. More importantly, most of them prefer using the default personal note application for the to-do list than to using the reminder app on the phone. They stated it is more convenient for writing and easier to use (more usable). They use a reminder only to be alerted for an event, plus they want to get multiple alarms rather than just one time.
The Target User Persona
Ideation
The information gathered from the user research was taken into a brainstorming session of how to best serve the user's needs. Each designer then created separate sketches to demonstrate how the Reminder X app could provide a helpful and intuitive service.
Prioritizing the Potential Solutions
Discussing with a team member about the user's difficulties and the different solutions.
User Journey Flow
Creating UX flow helped understand the whole user journey and covering all the screens
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Design
The designers discussed and combined their sketches for workflow and wireframe to determine the best solution. These sketches were made into a Mid-Fidelity Wireframe to get feedback from users before implementing the final design.
Wireframe
Mid-Fidelity Wireframe: a list of screens to cover all scenarios, using a grayscale wireframe enables designers to detail out the workflows and functions. A mid-fidelity prototype was also developed to test the solution with users and fix the problems in the early stage.
Usability Testing
The prototype was created in Adobe XD so the user testing could be examined and analyzed. Testing was done by the designers to ensure the flow and functions were easily understandable, usable, and effective while meeting the users’ needs.
Get User Feedback
Before starting creating a high fidelity visual design and any other implementation, prototypes were created to test the solutions with users and understand how the new solutions work. The mid-fidelity prototype was created in Adobe XD where basic interactivity could be added and tested. After asking users to use the prototype, they were given the 10 system usability scale questions (System Usability Score). They responded by scale point (1-5) for these questions. Then, the total scores of each participant’s response were calculated and analyzed to examine the usability of the prototype.
The feedback from the user testing was positive as the user understood the pathways and liked many of the features. The add categories and multiple views felt standard but were straightforward to use. The icons were helpful and being able to see the tasks as week, month, and in a list was liked. Furthermore, the user expressed excitement for the voice recording option. From this feedback the prototype was refined and finalized.
High Fidelity Mockups
After ensuring the usability of the prototype from the user testing, High Fidelity mock-up was implemented to present the final look of the Reminder X.
Learning from the Case Study
From the user research we could have gained more insight on the user’s needs for a reminder app and what difficulties they may have. This could have also been tested further with a round of user testing with the final prototype of the app. From the user testing, it was also found that while the initial audience was college students, with the category organization this Reminder X app would work for any person who needs their tasks organized with notifications.
The designers did discover from the information gathered from the participants and analyzing competitors' apps that there were solutions that could be tailored to the user’s needs in more effective and efficient ways from what was currently available in the app market.
