Upon starting this sprint, we first consulted with our client, an assistant professor for the Design department at UC Davis. We discussed the initial concept and idea behind a calendar tool that would schedule time to learn about racial injustice and promote anti-racist actions.
After consulting with our client, we wanted to get a better understanding of what kind of commitment users are willing to make to learn more about racial injustice and how people consider their current general knowledge on it, so we created a Google Form survey with questions pertaining to these along with general information about respondents including their own ethnicities.
After gathering these user insights, we created an experience map of a potential user to better understand any pain points that might occur along the way when trying to learn about racial injustice.
After this, we generated an affinity map to organize these pain points and ideate some solutions to them. We did this by listing pain points as sticky notes and then organizing them into categories, helping our team get a better understanding of how pain points may relate to each other and how to effectively tackle them.
From this, we were able to create our problem statement:
How might we encourage users to commit time each week to learn about racial injustice and set personal goals to spark understanding, self-reflection, and informed action?”
We looked at different scheduling apps that were mainly Google Chrome extensions. We took inspiration from numerous examples to help us understand how we should create our user flow and what kind of application we wanted to make for this, which we decided should be a Google Chrome extension as well. We thought about reflection objectives to increase retention and a reward system to help users commit to scheduling again. This ended with a couple wireframe sketches from me and the rest of our project group. The wireframes we sketched went over the scheduling process as well as the reflection interaction after viewing scheduled content.
We started with a low-fidelity prototype using Figma to create our app. We experimented with full size pages and interfaces that only took a small portion of the screen.
We consulted with our client and our mentor to move onto our high-fidelity prototype, where we created design guidelines and worked to improve the flow of our scheduling process.
We wanted to ensure that the process of users getting started was streamline and smooth. Part of this process was the specific language used in each screen to provide a sense of guidance and comfort throughout the process. Users should know exactly what they're supposed to do and why they're doing it.
From our user research, we wanted to incorporate seamless integration with Google Calendar and provide a scheduling interface that is both intuitive and familiar.
Users can view the scheduled block of time on a weekly calendar. This would only display the calendar events made from Justice Calendar.
After accessing content, a reflection window will automatically appear to streamline the process between absorbing information and reflecting on it.
Users can access a larger dashboard with their scheduled content. User stats can incite more engagement and promotes consistent use of Justice Calendar. Reflections for certain materials may hold a lot of important and insightful information, so users can also access past reflections in their journal.
We were able to conduct testing with our client at the time, and we continued to iterate on the diction and intuitiveness of the first-time user flow. At the end of the design sprint, our team presented our final version of the high-fidelity prototype to the rest of the cohort and other design professionals.
After the design challenge, our client hired the whole team to continue working on this product and start working with developers to turn the prototype into reality. In this stage, we worked with back-end developers while our group focused on design and front-end development. In this stage, we decided to switch from a browser plugin to a website considering what was feasible with our development team.
This project posed a lot of unique challenges for me and every other member of our project team. Working together as a group was a bit challenging given that a member lived in Australia with the rest of us in the US, so we always had to work around the differing time zones.
During our time working as hired designers for our client, we did not initially think that we’d be working partly as web developers as well. Most of our group was unfamiliar with coding in CSS or flexbox and other web design principles so we spent a lot of our working time just learning more about it. Our client had us work with the web development tool Webflow, so there was a slight learning curve as well when moving forward with this project
This was my very first design sprint while working with a real client and my very first taste of what real-world design work. Although it was challenging and intimidating at first, I came out of this project with so much more experience and knowledge of the design process and working with clients. I got introduced to research and ideation tools that helped me learn to empathize with users and prioritize pain points. Out of all the other project groups in Design Interactive, our project group was the only one to get hired by our client to continue our work. I got the opportunity to work with real web developers and learn how to effectively communicate with them in developing the overall application.
