FamBam
Case Study
Application Design for Creating Community through Common Interests
Mobile Application Design
12/1/2022- 5/1/2022
I worked on this project as a UX researcher, lead designer and product manager.
Main areas of responsibility included:
Content Research
UX analysis (flows and persona)
Application Design
Preliminary Sketches
Lo-fidelity Prototyping (basic flow and interactions)
Design Guide Creation
Hi-fidelity Prototyping and Mock Up
Summary:
The world has changed for many people over the last couple of years. At times, it has felt isolating for many. Friends, parents and children have felt a loss of kinship that will need to heal. During this period it can be hard for people to grow their social circle and find groups with common interests. In creating this application design, I explored ways for people to connect for like-minded activities. There is a heavy emphasis on creating a portal that facilitates parents finding activities that can be tailored to members of their family.
The Challenge:
In this Application Design, I challenged myself to create a design that would incorporate many family members into a group profile. The idea was to capture the interests of many in one easy to use platform. The profiles should be able to create custom group and event recommendations based upon their interests and provide a social aspect to share events with those they may know offline. Additionally, multiple schedules can be hard to coordinate, this in turn, means the scheduling and planning would need to be a key feature as well.
The main challenge would be keeping these 3 key features working in a smooth congruity. This would mean creating a design that seamlessly allows the user to define their interest, interact with people and events as well as providing efficient augmentations to their calendar.
Overcoming Obstacles:
The solution required exhaustive research and design. I approached the research by conducting interviews and developing Personas and Empathy Maps to create a more targeted design approach.
The personas were especially helpful and allowed me to lean into the design dynamics of a family based application.
This approach helped create the User stories I would base the rest of my design ideas upon.
Once I had a clear idea of who the application would be designed for as an end user, I developed preliminary Information Architecture Sitemap and User Flows.
User Flowchart.pdfMoving Through Design:
My first step was pen and paper design sketches. This allowed quick ideations of the concept to be visualized and lead to the creation Lo-fidelity prototypes.
I gained additional insight into how the application would be perceived by running preliminary usability tests on the Lo-fidelity prototype and made adjustments in this design stage based on my findings. Mainly experimenting with navigation techniques between screens to see what felt most natural.
From here, A mood board was born, helping provide the soul of the product I was designing. It provided the foundation on which to produce the design guide by creating the feeling that experience would transcend the application itself.
It was then I was able to create a design guide, on which I brought my Hi-fidelity prototype to life. This helped organize my design approach in an easily repeatable fashion.
Once the first design iteration was completed, I proceeded to perform an additional round of Usability Tests and tweak my design to become even more accessible to the user.
Adjustments were made iteratively until I came to a product that had better readability and usability.
Throughout the design process I made sure to fully reflect the MVP features of the application. I was able to incorporate multiple users and their interest in the account creation. There were additional ways to edit and add more interests later in the application as well. Users are also able to create their own events, join groups that have a common theme, share events and add events to a calendar.
Reflection:
Conducting this design process from beginning to end was a huge learning opportunity. I was able to see how the UX and UI elements of design can work together and the final product is all the better for it. Of course, improvements that can be made. Additional iterations of this design can be tweaked and adjusted. However, this process gave valuable insight on my strengths and weaknesses that can be improved.