My First UX Case Study for Google UX Certification
I’m a Certified Financial Advisor with 3 years of experience who recently pivoted her career to UX Design. This is my first UX Project I did as a part of Google Professional UX Certification
I have completed 5 out of total 7 courses in the program with 95% grade average. I’ve found this program immensely helpful in teaching an absolute beginner carefully about all the important concepts in UX Design.
Browse Concerts from Musicians Nearby
We aim to allow Indie musicians to organise concerts for a wide spectrum of online/offline audience. We intend to offer this app to musicians for a low fixed-commission fee-based model.
User facing app is intended to help music enthusiasts find and book concerts and music gigs near them.
Problem we’re solving
The target users of the IndiePendent app face difficulty in finding and booking concerts nearby. They feel disappointed with the fact that it takes hours of research to find affordable music concerts/gigs of their choice near them to enjoy with friends over the weekend.
Our Goal
Our goal was to design the app that is simple for all users and allows music enthusiast to easily find and book concerts and music gigs of their favourite artists near them.
About Designer
My name is Yesha Shah. I’m less than 2 months old to the world of product design. My role in this project as a UX designer was to take ownership of the app’s design
Project Duration
February 2021 to April 2021
Industry
Events and Hospitality
My Responsibilities
user research, wire-framing, prototype, usability testing, iteration, and the creation of the final high-fidelity prototype.
Among all the design frameworks taught to us in the Google Certification, I chose a simplistic Lean UX approach to my project. We constantly pivoted our design based on the feedback from relevant users and experts at the earliest.
We performed foundational user research to understand more about the personas that is the target audience of the IndiePendent User App.
Primary Research: We recruited 2 Male, 3 Female participants who agreed to provide us their time and feedback during the project. We interviewed them about their life, general behaviour and more to form our initial impression. We learned a lot from first-hand user interaction and observation.
Secondary Research: We analysed industry reports and other public research studies in event and concert industry (software and otherwise).
We also made a Bubble-Graph for the key delights and objections in the app store reviews of other competitors. We also engaged in the indie-musician discord groups to understand more about what they expect from an app like this.
We then built empathy maps for each participants that were later collated to create user personas.
User Personas
We interviewed a few musician friends to understand the kind of audience that frequent in their concerts the most. Furthermore, we analysed the loyal users of our competitors to create an initial broad understanding of the personas we may we focusing on.
Then we recruited 5 people among our network which suit the persona profiles. We scheduled a short call/chat with each one of them to get a basic understanding about their behaviour before usability testing at a later stage
User Journey Map
To empathise with the users, we also a created empathy maps and user journey map to dig deeper into each stage that our personas go through while booking a concert ticket.
Problem Statement & Hypothesis
Identifying the problems that users face is one of the most important parts of UX design. It is imperative to have a problem-solution fit. We ensured that by starting with clear problem statements for our primary personas. We used “who, what, when, where, why, and how” to create these statements.
Then we created the hypothesis for the potential user experience. We’d later test that in usability testing.
Crazy Eight (Ideation Technique)
Based on the hypothesis, I did multiple sessions of crazy-eight exercises for all the top use cases. This laid down the initial ideas for the app. But I ensured there aren’t any biases. These designs were subject to pivot/change based on the formative and competitive research.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive audits are one of the many valuable steps you can take during the ideation process. We analysed the major direct and indirect competitors to our app concept and rated their experience based on our custom framework of 4 points under 5 pre-made categories. This allowed us to easily visualise the emotional aspect of the journey using emoji annotations. We also made a note of the Information Architecture of each competitor.
User Flow of Ticketing in General
After exploratory and market research, I had gotten a fair understanding of the primary user flows for IndiePendent app. User flow allowed me to see the complete app experience at a holistic level. Furthermore, this flowchart helped me make a checklist of all the pages to be designed (represented by orange).
Storyboards
Storyboard is a series of panels or frames that visually describes and explores a user’s experience with a product.
To further empathise with users and see a bigger picture of the process we created many big-picture storyboards. Each storyboard represented a major user-flow. To further drill into their product experiences we made close-up storyboards as well.
Wireframes (Paper and Digital)
I initially started sketching on TheNicheMind Wireframe Sheets to lay down the basic ideas. We also made a paper-prototype of the same using images to test it with our participants.
We implemented the usability testing findings in the digital wireframes to finally see something that looks like a real app.
Usability Testing Plan
To test the low-fidelity prototype with real users we planned a usability testing session. See the full Usability Testing Report here.
Affinity Mapping to categorise observations
Once we finished all the usability testing sessions, we collected a huge amount of data in form of audio/video recordings and transcripts. These transcripts were then used to make an affinity map to find the common patterns in these observations.
Pattern & Insight Recognition in Research Observations
Affinity mapping is visually easy to understand, but hard to analyse for patterns quickly. To do so, I used this technique taught by our mentors from Google.
We divided the observations from usability testing sessions among these themes that are color coded in the spreadsheet.
- Opinions on the product’s usefulness. These are indicated in red.
- Ease or difficulty completing the assigned tasks. These types of behaviors are indicated in blue.
- Attitude, or tone of voice, when completing the assigned tasks. These are indicated in green.
Here are the insights we found after analysing the above patterns and common observations:
- Add details/info icon in the food/value-added services in the event detail page
- Show an onboarding of how to use and save ticket for first time users.\
- Have an onboarding bubble/interaction to educate users about the Map view, as most had difficulty discovering it.
- Most Valuable Insight: Make the map view more usable by color-coding and quick view in the map to avoid back-n-forth.
Final UI Designs
Inclusive and Accessible Design
I wanted to design a UI that’s similarly delightful for all kinds of humans and beyond. Here are the few examples where we made the app easier to use by inclusive design.
Peer Reviews on this project from around the world
Thank you all so much for reaching the end of this case study.
My Personal Website
I’ve also published this case study on my first personal website with EditorX by Wix. Check it out at: https://yeshadesign.editorx.io/home
👏 Clap on this Blog if you like it.
Tag a friend who is looking to get started in UX Design. I’m sure they’d find this blog about how Google Professional UX Certification helped me in getting clarity for my career.
Got a project you need UI UX for? Reach out to me yyesha.shahh(at)gmail(dot)com
