UX research, UX and UI design process
Who had doubts when choosing their professional future?
There are many of us who have found ourselves at 16 or 18 years old, if not older, with a thousand questions before this difficult choice, what to study?
Alejandría is an application that helps students to find their vocation, the better studies or profession according to them. Based on their hobbies, their attitudes and how they are.
The problem
There’s an important problem that affects a lot of people, 1 out of every 5 students changes careers in the 1st year of university in Catalonia, which represents an expense of 42 million euros for the Generalitat and families.
But it’s not only about numbers of students it means wasting years of their lives in studies that do not contribute to them and they would begin to build their professional future much later.
The solution
We’ve created a service that helps the students to find the best studies or profession for them with multiple personality and vocational test, more interactive, shorts and in the same places.
As well, we give them quality information to better choose their studies.
UX research
How do we arrive there?
With design think, using the methodologies of Lean UX and iterating a lot we arrived to this problem and to find a solution for it, with these steps.
Iteration process of design thinking
1.Emphatise
2.Define
3.Ideate
4.Prototype
5.Test
1.Emphatise
Interviews and surveys
To understand the real problems that students find when they have to decide their studies, we started the investigation making interviews with students, teachers, psychologists for emphatise with them and understand better the problems that they found in the process.
After this interview we arrive to this hypothesis:
Through surveys following quantitative generative research, we corroborated the hypothesis.
Saturation of information, but missing information of value
Little advice, they found very alone before a decision that is very important and there is a lack of contact with professionals and the labour market
Lack of self-knowledge and a lot of confusion
Desk research
We’ve started to investigate the problems in education nowadays. We focus especially on the difficulty of choosing a career, because it is a problem that all of us had and that currently is not already solved. So we use a lot the methodology of desk research during all the process of the project to help us to learn about the topic, investigate, compare with other app and services,…and find the users’ needs and what they’re worried about.
User persona
To understand more their problem and empathize with our users, we created this two user persona. A representative of our group of users, with their motivations, behaviors, pains and gains that help us to identify what they need of the product we’re designing and don’t lose the focus to give them a service to benefit them
User persona: Lucia (17 years student), Javier (32 years profesional)
2. Define
After finishing the first research and analyzing the hypothesis that we arrived, we started to define the product in order to shape an increasingly tangible solution.
So we used different tools to understand more Lucia and trying to find a solution for our users like her.
Value proposition canvas
This is a tool which can help ensure that a product or service is positioned around what the customer values and needs. First, we defined the customer job, and analised the pains and gains that the user can find.
Once defined, we thought how we can give value with our solution to the user, with the gain creators and the pain relievers, and how this is translated into specific services or products.
Value Proposition Canvas: help us to define the needs and requirements of the users.
User flows
We work for make and architecture of information clear and useful, with the user flows and thinking more of how is the user is moving in the app we could develop more, and make more intuitive all the information that we want to give.
User flow of one student looking for some student experience.
User flow of the professional, looking for some studies and sharing his professional experience.
3. Ideate
When we identify the problem, we decided on which part we want to apport a solution, and what is our value proposition. Nowadays there is a lot of information, so we don’t want to make only an app that you have all the information in one.
Value proposition
Our value is that we help the student in all the process, with the part of missions, like a game, we help them to know more what they like, to find the better studies or profession according to them and if they need more help there is the part of the advice with coach.
The information that you found in the app is all real reviews by students, alumni and professionals that give more a real idea of what you will find in the different studies and universities and you can contact them.
Business Canvas Model
4. Prototype
After making the respective wireframes and analyzing the user flows of the product, we started to build higher fidelity prototype.
Design system
We make a design system to decide the color palette, the topography that we will use and different dimensions and the components that we have in all the design, like tap bar, buttons, icons,…
Colors
Using orange as the primary colour of our application because we want to convey fun, creativity, adventure, enthusiasm, success. It’s and adventure the different missions to finally find your vocation.
Logo
The logo of Alejandría is summarized in the initial “a” with the final “a” of the word. It symbolizes the process of finding your vocation. This journey, in which you enter with a thousand doubts and end up finding your studies and profession according to your interests and way of being.
5. Test
We create a prototype to test Alejandría, two different types one for students and the other for professionals. They have two different general tasks.
– For the students they have to enter for the first time in the application and do the first mission, the second task was to find the opinion of one student of a design degree. – For the professionals they have to find opinions of a profession, to find a new master and to give and opinion of their studies.
We saw and were able to verify first hand the great usefulness and value it has. All the users understand and have a good user experience and they told us some things to improve. So it was a really great experience and we learned the importance of this test, to study if they have a good user experience and to redefine paths that were not clear and actions to make more understandable.
Conclusions
During this process, we understand the importance of this contact with the user, with the test, the interviews, the surveys, and all the tools that we use to approach more to them to finally develop a project that really helps, with this feedback we reduce this pain point and iterate the information to make the more understandable and useful.
The user is the center of what we do so we couldn’t design without this process of understanding what they really need, how he thing, for this it was really helpful the user personas, to really emphasize with them.
We iterate a lot and we found problems during the design, for us, we have a lot of information that we want to put into this app to give a good service, so was really complicated to make and understandable architecture of information and to give a good user experience. So was really helpful the test to prove that we are in the good way and to improve some things.
