“LikeHome” is a conceptual mobile application I made as part of my Monash University boot camp. LikeHome was made over a 4 week sprint and focused mainly on UX and user Research and a high fidelity prototype produced on Figma.
The Interview plan phase was daunting, much like starting any new project, but like Lao Tzu once said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a simple step”. There was a big focus on asking the right questions to get the qualitative data I was after. See the plan and transcripts here (hyperlink).
The next step was to create an affinity diagram from the interviews I conducted. After that I sorted all the feedback into categories like: methods of booking, style of travel, demographic data etc. (link gif), I then used the affinity diagram to make an empathy map that lead to the creation of the user persona, Johan Sturge!
The user insight gathered from the research was “Our users, 25-35 year old millennials need to quickly compare and book flights and accommodation because they are busy people and booking travel is usually not a fun experience.”.
After doing some brainstorming on why this is a painful experience I carried out a competitor analysis which led to the problem statement “Our competitors are failing to retain users because they are becoming frustrated with having to book and compare flights/accommodation in more than one place.”
The feature prioritisation matrix allowed me to to realise what features would require the least work but could have the biggest impact for our users in the real world, although this matrix may not be super in depth, I have some experience and knowledge in development so tried to be as realistic as possible. For example, Airbnb integration may seem complicated but there is actually an API for this feature.
The value proposition portion of the research helped solidify how our users want to interact with the app and what benefits they will get out of it by breaking down their core needs, pains and gains. I believe the Airbnb integration and having a massive, but easily searchable range of options will help retain users and separate our app from the rest of the pack.
Using the value proposition matrix and the feature prioritization matrix I was able to create a basic user scenario on how our prospective user may use the app. The Storyboarding and user journey map process were greatly beneficial as they allowed me to really flesh out what possible feature may have been missed during the feature prioritization process; for instance, Google/Facebook account integration wasn’t thought about until the user journey map process.
The user flow was super helpful for mapping out my sketches and eventually my lo fi prototypes. After receiving feedback from my instructors and peers around the user flow chart I decided to strip it back to just the on boarding process but expand on what each screen contains and why it’s being included See it here.
The paper prototyping process was very easy to do after referencing the user flow diagram I did in the previous step, I’m finding throughout the process that as each previous step is done well it sets up the next step to be done better. Having a well thought out user flow set me up to have a well set out paper prototype.
Using the paper prototype as a guide made making the Lo-Fi prototyping stage quite easy as I just had to recreate what I had sketched on Figma. I really suckered myself with the clickable Hi-Fi prototype as I really wanted to make it look functional even though it wasn’t required for this project. It was easy to set out but creating a hover function for each button made it a good learning process worth the outcome!
The user testing phase helped bring the whole project together and helped highlight the things I missed when I was initially making the prototype as well as establishing more cohesive design patterns. The user testing phase helped bring the whole project together and helped highlight the things I missed when I was initially making the prototype as well as establishing more cohesive design patterns.The changes made based on the user testing where as follows:
The people I tested were happy with the prototype and said it was fairly intuitive. Adding the iOS features to the prototype made it feel a lot more real, even though they were small changes like intergrating the top status bar and the home bar I felt it really helped sell the idea and vision so much better.
If I was given more time on this project I would have liked to flesh out the Discover and booking sections of the app a little more as well as some optimisations on the animations and add a preview of what logging in with Google or Facebook Would look like. All in all this first project of mine was a great learning experience and the feedback I received from initials testing and my Instructors was incredibly beneficial to helping further my projects.
See the Google Slides presentation here.