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My Role
Timeline
Tools
Methods
Project Manager
User Researcher
3 Weeks
12 Mar 2021 - 05 Apr 2021
Figma
InVision
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Heuristics Evaluator
Mural
Heuristics Evaluation
Sketcher
Google Suite
Competitive Analysis
User Persona
Usability Tester
Customer Journey Mapping
Feature Prioritization
User Flow
Wireframes
Interactive Prototypes
Usability Testing
Project Summary
Noki Fit, in short, "Noki", is a new concept that will soon be launched into the market. It is a platform that connects both Athletes and Sports Brands together. Using Noki's "building blocks", our team tested on it with an aim to understand the target audiences' motivations and pain points, to cohesively put together the features of the platform with ease of usage. On top of that, we also introduced new features to provide an understanding of the purpose of Noki; and personalized dashboard with enhanced visual and interaction designs.
Project Challenge
Being a new concept, it is fairly tough for the team to find concrete references to learn from and improve on the platform. There were also a number of features that were requested by our client to put in the platform, to be done without compromising users' understandability and usability of the navigation. Therefore, the hierarchy and prioritization must first be identified through in-depth user research.
Understand with Stakeholders
Our team mainly meets with the stakeholders face-to-face 3 times a week, and the rest of the daily check-ins (Scrum framework) via Zoom. We include the stakeholders to conduct research by facilitating meetings with them; we discussed about research methods, participant sizes and findings.
Design Process
The Double Diamond Design Process Model was used to help our team to have a common understanding towards our goals with the use of Agile practices. Besides, it represents a process of exploring Noki's issues more widely and deeply with divergent thinking, and then taking focused action through convergent thinking.
Discover
Discover
How did we assess Noki's platforms?
We conducted User Interviews (Methodology: In-Person & Remote) and Affinity Mapping to identify any common habits, needs and pain points of the target users striving to achieve their fitness goals, or even during the purchase of sports brands.
User Interview criteria:
User must be active in any forms of sports or fitness journey
User must have a sports brand they love, or are loyal to
From the User Interviews with 10 participants, age 22-29, we have gathered several key insights as below.
Using the Jakob Nielsen's 10 Heuristics, we evaluated the current Mobile and Desktop Web and rounded up to several problem areas on each platform which we focused on the ones with higher severities.
Together with Usability Testing with 10 participants on the existing platforms, the issues that we'd identified are as below.
What's wrong with the existing Noki's platforms?
#1: Disruptive user flow
Clicking different parts of the cards bring users to different pages. Furthermore, users tend to be brought out of Noki site, into the individual Brands' sites whenever they accidentally clicked onto any brand names
Recommendations:
Ensuring that the entire card only lead users to 1 destination; and disallow users to be disrupted no matter what. Retaining users in Noki site is priority
#2: Lost in navigation
The chevron icon is typically recognized as "expand", not "add". Hence it was easy for users to miss out the Call-to-action, and affected the tasks negatively
Recommendations:
Use a widely recognizable "add" button to reduce users' cognitive load. Also, arranging the features throughout the site to ensure consistency will aid in this aspect as well
What can we learn from the competitor brands?
Using Feature Inventory, we conducted both Competitive & Comparative Analysis, we looked and compared the essential features that Noki's competitors has that we could learn from to implement and enhance Noki's platform to better achieve its business goals:
Learning curve for new users
Unlike Nuffnang and Obviously, Noki's concept is fairly complicated and strategic, and without any form of tutorial for new users, it will not be difficult to see why the dropout rates are high
Personalized fitness profile on Noki
Strava is a platform that Noki could learn from, to allow athletes/users to be able to prove themselves credible since this platform is for athletes and brands to connect to form a partnership
Define
Define
Who are our users?
The findings that were garnered from the Discover stage informed our User Persona as well as the Customer Journey Map to develop a clear understanding of target users as well as keeping the team aligned and focused on issues that mattered.
“Everyone is on their own journey, not to fit in somebody's goals or the societal standards.”
Which features to fix first?
Without losing sight of the purpose of this study, we used the data from Heuristics Evaluation, User Research and Usability Tests, we prioritized features that greatly impact both Users' and Business' needs (top right section with green background). In addition, there are a few new features that we would like to implement in Prototype v1.0:
A new Site Map was created to offer a plausible and better experience for our User Persona according to her needs and challenges which translates it into our new proposed User Flow.
Develop
Develop
Streamlining the User Interfaces
Post brainstorming - the variety of Hand Sketches made it easy to quickly visualize concepts and ideas for the redesign. We then picked, combined and enhanced the ideation; put it into play as Low-Fidelity Wireframes. Since Noki is a responsive site, Mobile-First approach was used to ensure the information will be able to compressed into the smallest device to create seamless experience on any platform.
Deliver
Deliver
How did we validate our proposed designs?
2 additional Usability Tests were conducted with 8 and 10 different participants on our Interactive Prototypes v1.0 and v2.0 respectively to validate our designs based on the 5 tasks below. It was brought up by users that they will seek for technical assistance or FAQ since they were facing difficulties in completing the Usability Tests on the existing platforms. Hence, the fifth task was included into our Prototype v1.0 onwards: Seek for technical assistance.
5/8 users likes the consistency of have the "Contact us" in the footer on every page
7/8 users did not know what exactly are they recommending when they click the share icon
4/8 users thinks that there are clear separation between Athletes and Brands sign up
6/8 users thought that the "Partnership" tab could be better named to reduce confusion
Design Iterations
Results
Results
How did we measure the outcomes?
Due to the nature of a new business concept, users tend to doubt the motives behind certain actions, and with this lack of context, it was difficult for users to understand and complete certain tasks such as uploading images while creating a fitness goal. We documented the findings of each usability test and we can see huge improvements in the Task Success, SEQ and SUS score for both Mobile and Desktop with each test. Here is a summary of our findings:
Desktop
Existing vs Prototype v2.0
Mobile
Existing vs Prototype v2.0
System Usability Scale: 43.50 to 90.50
System Usability Scale: 43.00 to 87.00
Retrospective
Retrospective
Next steps
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Clarity of Forms
There are several forms to be filled by users in order to fully utilize the platform, however the clarity could be further improved due to the results from the latest Usability Test
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Cohesive Design between Brands and Athletes
Strike a design balance between the two paths as only the Athlete's path was looked and researched into
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Plausible e-commerce
CEO of Noki has plans in implementing e-commerce concept into the current platform which will be a game changer for their existing users. Besides having many design concerns that must be addressed and put in place in order for this plan to be successful, there were findings from the User Interview that could help improve this concept.
Reflections
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Planned schedule for this design marathon is important. As the project manager, I have huge responsibilities over the entire course of project including time management, quality deliverables, and actual problem-solving
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Though adopting very different working style from the rest of my group, I'm grateful that the effective communication (using Slack as primary means of communicating) we had essentially helped me to adjust and shape the pace of the project in the first week that suited everyone
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Differences may be a good thing as everyone has different things to bring to the table. The tricky part is to harness the power of this double-edged sword to our advantage. With the willingness to understand, compromise and collaborate, this was never a problem for our team
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The role of a project manager allowed me to learn not just about time management and scheduling, but also leadership and to bring the team together and work in harmony. I am appreciative of this opportunity to be able to lead this team, eventually achieving great results that is beyond our own expectations
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