Responsibilities
Team Lead
User Research
Pushing through with coffee! ☕️🥳
Executive Summary
Matchi aims to bridge the gap between emerging creatives and professionals in the design industry. By providing a more effective, intuitive, and seamless platform for pairing skills and needs, we will be giving creatives and professionals the tools they need to connect with each other. Matchi aims to improve the poor user experience that all current solutions to this problem suffer.
Matchi achieves these goals through the use of online interactive elements that simplify the process of coach pairing. Clear user flow will allow emerging creatives and professionals alike to accomplish their tasks with minimal time and effort. The implementation of a consistent, universally usable, and shallow learning curve will promote an internal locus of control for users of any experience level, thereby guaranteeing a pleasant user experience.
Problem Statement
Existing mentorship platforms lack ease of use, personalized matching as well as accountability aspects to help emerging creatives and professionals work together to reach desired goals.
Research
The first stage of research was to look at our competitors and assess the strengths and weaknesses of their design. Second, we developed a questionnaire that was used during the qualitative research phase. This phase was quintessential. It helped us understand the pain points that users encounter when interacting with existing mentorship websites in addition to what they would like to see on our platform.
Major Findings
From user interviews, competitive research, and contextual analysis we discovered some major findings. These different phases also helped us understand user expectations, needs, and motivations. We used these major findings to guide all of our product design decisions.
Frustrations with the quality of opportunities
Accessibility
Networking/meeting people
Scheduling conflict
Lack of Accountability
User persona
Following the research, we came up with a persona and scenario that would serve as a representation of all the common user needs, goals, tasks, pain points that we obtained from user interviews and competitive research.
Information Architecture
After identifying a few major features, I mapped out the information architecture to show the hierarchy of major and minor features. Doing this gave us an idea of how to organize content and how many interactions or screens it'll take to complete a task. Below is an example of the IA for the "sign up" task.
Ideation
Keeping in mind our major findings, we created elements throughout our wireframes that solved users’ concerns. After creating the first round of lo-fi mockups, we conducted usability tests to assess whether the navigation process/features of our platform worked as intended. We conducted two user task tests and the criteria included effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.
Results & Final Design
We performed a total of four usability tests and the time required for task completion varied across participants. The task flow for our “Sign Up” task was identical among the participants, however, the “Match display” task varied. This information allowed us to fix details in our design that did not contribute to the user experience or were simply confusing.
Lessons Learned
The most salient measure of our design process was the usability test and the greatest lesson we learned from the entire design process was “the user is not like me.” Creating a lo-fi mockup for a fictitious website was definitely not an easy task. It was challenging to keep track of all the minor details and always keep the user in mind, but creating a space to document everything helped me stay organized and focused on the big picture.
Although this was a group project, a couple of things that I personally learned through this entire experience are:
Take user research with a grain of salt.
User interviews and surveys are not going to give you a clear answer. Sometimes the insights you gain from the initial field research won't always point you in the right direction. It is always important to keep the user in mind through every process but it isn't until the usability testing phase where you really find out what works and what doesn't work in your platform.
Set a standard for success.
Creating a threshold for success for each task would better help us determine whether the user experience was intuitive or not.