Progress Puppy: A UX Design Retrospective
Summary
For our first project in the General Assembly UX Design Immersive course, we were asked to research, design and test a low-fidelity rapid prototype of a solution in one of four general topics. The category I was assigned was Education.
I began the design process by asking general questions to a variety of users with differing educational backgrounds. Based on the information I gathered from the few teachers I interviewed, I was able to identify several problems that they said their students faced in the classroom. Here is a summary of the problem Progress Puppy intends to solve:
Target user: Middle school and high school students with smart phones and issues with time management.
Problem statement: Young students need a more effective way to stay accountable to themselves and to their peers while working on personal and group projects.
From these specifications, I was able to narrow in on the idea of creating a progress tracker app with an emotional component. The App uses a metaphor of a puppy to evoke an emotional response from the user. As the user completes the steps of an assignment, the puppy gets fed. If the user procrastinates, the puppy will starve.
I will now take you through my process and how I reached my conclusions.
Research and Synthesis
As the category of Education is so broad, at first I was very unsure of where to begin. I chose to interview four of my peers at General Assembly in order to narrow in on both my user, and the problem I wished to solve. I asked questions such as: “What is your educational background?” “What kind of learner would you describe yourself as?” “How would you describe your time management skills?” and “What has been your experience working on group projects?” With these questions as a base line, my interviews branched off topic organically depending on the user’s personal experiences. This was both good and bad. Good because I gained insights into my users that I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, and bad due to the moments of awkwardness that would occur when I had to pause to think of where to take the conversation next once we had veered off script.
Two out of the four interviewees were teachers, while the other two had extensive experience being students. Even though all of my users were college educated and chose their respective schools for prestige, half expressed choosing the school for smaller class sizes where the other half enjoyed larger classes. Each of my users possessed a smart phone and used some variation of a calendar app to track their appointments and project due dates. At the end of my interview process, I had gathered a whole lot of seemingly unrelated information. With the help of affinity mapping, I was able to separate my gathered data into seven unique problem areas. With the data in these categories, I was able to spot three major trends in the data:
- 3/4 users like small class sizes and personalized attention.
- 3/3 of the students with good time management skills learned those skills at an early age.
- 4/4 interviewees found working on group projects frustrating because there was no clear way to make sure that each member of the team was doing the work they were assigned.
From these observations, I concluded that:
- Personal connections between teachers and students and students and their peers are essential for life-long learning.
- Time management is a skill that can be practiced and perfected.
- Students need a more effective way to stay accountable to themselves and their peers while working on personal and group projects.
Ideation
My Ideation process began after I narrowed down the problem I was trying to solve. With my problem statement in mind, a group consisting of myself and my peers brainstormed app ideas. Of the ideas that were suggested, I was drawn to the idea of a progress tracker app. However, I knew that many similar ideas were out there, and needed to figure out what would make my idea be unique and stand out. Drawing on the essential insight I made during affinity mapping, that students need personalized connections to incentivize themselves, and I thought about using something living as a metaphor for their assignments. Drawing inspiration from apps such as Forest, where the user grows a forest to promote phone inactivity, I decided to use a puppy as a metaphor to encourage students to complete their assignments on time.
Iteration
As I began to sketch, I didn’t have a great idea of how I wanted the screens to look or which task the user should accomplish first. I had too many ideas and was trying to accomplish too much — can you say feature paralysis? As a result, my first few iterations were all over the place. It wasn’t until I chose a simple task for my user to complete that the app really started to come together.
User Testing
My first few rounds of user testing were helpful, but after reviewing how exactly to user test along with the dos and don’ts, I realized that I had made several mistakes in conducting them, such as leading the user through the app and not observing my user’s body language since I was preoccupied with writing down their responses. I also realized that I didn’t effectively explain the purpose of my app and the task I expected the user to complete prior to beginning the test. After realizing my mistakes, I created a scenario to better set the stage:
“You are a student that has been procrastinating on a research project. You get a notification from Progress Puppy that your puppy is dying. You’ve finally completed step 3 of your project. Would you please update the status of your project in the app?”
With this scenario in mind, I was able to conduct more effective user tests and get more usable feedback.
Some of the feedback I received including a progress bar on every page, clarifying how the user was to interact with the Puppy, and added feature suggestions to make the app more appropriate for younger children. For example, in my first few iterations, I hadn’t clarified how completing an assignment and the Puppy were related. I initially thought that each time a piece of the assignment was created, the puppy would learn a new trick. However, I soon discovered that the “teach me a trick” button was confusing to users, as they expected more of a game element and were disappointed when all they really had to do was update a checkbox. To solve this problem, I changed the puppy’s main function to being fed, so that it’s health was tied to the user’s interactions with the app. I received positive feedback from my users after making this change, as it drew on their feelings of nostalgia for games such as Tamagotchi and Neopets.
Final Prototype and User Flow
After my final round of User Tests, I had a functioning low-fidelity prototype created on the Marvel.com platform.
When presenting this flow, I gave some background on what task I expected the user to be completing.
Final Thoughts and Project Evaluation
After presenting my app to the class, I reflected on my process and what I would change/add to the project if I was given more time.
For starters, I would have first done some cognitive analysis so that I could have narrowed my focus before moving into the user interviews. Had I not interviewed teachers by chance, this would have been a very different application. Additionally, I wasn’t able to complete any form of comparative analysis, so I do not know if anything like this already exists on the market.
On the positive side, I believe that once I had clarified my app and user group, it came together very easily. However, if I were to revisit this project in the future, I would want to further define my users and interview/test on middle and high school students to see if something like this would be beneficial to them.
Additionally, I would want to further develop this application in a high fidelity and add more features such as a group project function, admin functions for teachers to set up assignments, and a share functionality so that students can post their progress on social media as well as email their status to their teachers.
Overall I found this to be a very fun and enlightening experience. The UX iterative process which once seemed so daunting to me now feels attainable. I am glad I was able to dive in head first and come up on the other side having learned a lot about both UX and about how I work under pressure.
