Lit review and competitive audit
The team reviewed many articles, books, and scholarly writings to get basic information on gamification and productivity. We also looked into potential competitors and what their draws and drawbacks were. With all this research, we had a great general idea of how we would design Laiph.
The team reviewed many articles, books, and scholarly writings to get basic information on gamification and productivity. We also looked into potential competitors and what their draws and drawbacks were. With all this research, we had a great general idea of how we would design Laiph.
User interviews and persona
Though we knew how we'd design Laiph, we weren't creating it for ourselves. We were seeking to create an app that others would benefit from. And how do we get information on our users? User interviews! The team sought out 5 candidates that were our target audience, students or workers who needed some sort of organization and motivation in their life.
During the interviews we tried to pull information regarding pain-points with current productivity apps, the effectiveness of different gamification implementations, and general qualities of the user (such as how generally organized they are). After each of us took notes from each interview, we sat down and put together similar topics and traits we wrote down into affinity maps. We then highlighted repeating patterns in our plotted research.
These patterns would be combined into a persona, which (from our research) is our common user, who we are creating Laiph for.
Now that we had an amalgamated user we could focus our design around, the team began to brainstorm features for Laiph. We referenced our research from the literature review and competitive audit as well as our user research for this. Once we had our list written down, we each compared common ideas and plotted it out with affinity mapping.
We now had a general idea of what WE envisioned for the app. We then used our persona and user interview results to piece together necessary features based on the goals they're looking to accomplish with Laiph. Now that we have all of these features down, we had a roadmap for our wireframing.
Wireframing and prototyping
The team began wireframing using the requirements established previously. We knew what we needed so it was easy to go in and create it all. We discussed what frames to make together over a few work sessions so we could build on our ideas more. We knew the wireframing was complete when our persona could work through a flow to accomplish their goals.
Then it was onto prototyping. I setup the file for the team, including color styles (with 100-900 color variables), text styles, an 8-pt grid, and a Figma help. I assigned various pages to various teammates based on their understanding of Figma and held help sessions where I would help them work through any difficulties they were having. After roughly 2 weeks and 3 phases of Figma assignments, our prototype was ready… sorta.
It's important to get feedback at this stage from our users so we know if we hit the mark or not, so the team had 2 usability interviews. We had our users share their screen as they worked their way through the prototype, giving us feedback as they went along. We took notes and made adjustments. Laiph was now right in front of our eyes.
