Team
Wilson Chen
Sarah Stumme
Mitchelle D'Souza
Michael Bui
Sarah Stumme
Mitchelle D'Souza
Michael Bui
My Role
Project Management
Workshopping
User Research
Prototyping
Workshopping
User Research
Prototyping
Methods
Field studies
Semi-structured interviews
Personas
Storyboards
Usability testing
Semi-structured interviews
Personas
Storyboards
Usability testing
Scope
Class project for HCDE 518 - User Centered Design
End-to-end project
10 weeks (part-time)
End-to-end project
10 weeks (part-time)
Group projects can feel scary sometimes.
How can we address common challenges emergent in group project settings to improve the experience of collaboration?
The Motivation
As future UX practitioners, working alongside teammates, users, and stakeholders is paramount to what we do.
As new students to University of Washington's Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) program, our team was especially keen to understand group dynamics at a stage when nobody knew each other.
We noticed a recurring theme when talking with peers in our cohort - people feel nervous about group projects.
Here's the result of a brainstorming workshop I led. Our team aligned on an initial research question and considered the dimensions that group work could take.
Understanding our audience
To get a better window into teammate pain points, our team conducted field studies and semi-structured interviews with our classmates to find out firsthand. We supplemented this with secondary research about what makes an effective team.
After data collection, I conducted a research debrief workshop, where we discussed our findings and synthesized them to identify themes and create personas.
Exploratory Methods
Field study
Semi-structured interviews
Secondary research
A board where we aggregated findings from our user research.
Defining our personas
Using the research findings we collected, we grouped similar themes to arrive at a ground truth of user needs.
Using "I want/I need" statements, we categorized similar needs to build our persona archetypes.
In the end, we found three distinct users to prioritize: the hesitater, the relationship builder, and the project planner.
Synthesis Methods
Affinity mapping
Thematic analysis
User need statements ("I want.../I need...")
Through affinity mapping, we grouped our insights into common themes.
Individual insights within themes were further divided into subthemes, from which "I want.../I need..." statements were formed.
Finally, we grouped I want/I need statements into buckets based on related themes. After these were grouped, we identified a type of personality that we could attribute to each grouping, leading to these three personas!
The names at the top reflect ownership over each persona.
Huzzah! Our Personas!
IDEATION
Sketching Workshop
Using our personas, we came up with a list of user needs, and design requirements to meet those needs.
From there, each of us aimed to come up with 6 rapid-fire sketches for solution that would address these needs. At this point, anything goes. No idea is a bad idea!
Once we got all of our ideas on the table, we rearranged them into themes. The top themes that emerged were:
Dashboard
Playbook/Activities
Team Formation
Here's a compilation of this workshopping session! Credits to Mitchelle and Sarah for these photos.
Refining the Themes
After arriving at our three core themes, we each took ownership over one theme and expanded on that idea, using similar sketches related to the theme from our sketching workshop.
Ultimately, we decided to combine some elements of all three themes into a shared vision for a dashboard in Notion.
Prototyping
Storyboards and User Flows
Once we had our design goals outlined, we created user flows and accompanying storyboards. This would help us imagine how our personas would interact with our Notion dashboard.
Storyboard: Checking team progress
Storyboard: First team meeting
Storyboard: Finding project resources
Lo-Fi Prototyping
Once we validated our use cases through storyboards and user flows, we began to set up the information architecture and create our initial lo-fi prototypes.
Mid-Fi Prototyping
Once we aligned on the direction and layout of our Notion prototype, we set out to create a mid-fi version that would implement the system in an interactive and believable form.
The next step? Evaluate it.
Evaluation
We took our mid-fi prototypes to the classroom (a room full of our potential users!) and conducted a usability study with three classmates.
This was a really valuable session! Mitchelle and I gathered useful information about how our classmates perceived different components, and how they navigated the system.
Using this data, we iterated on our design to build out a working version of our product on Notion.
That's me conducting a usability test with a classmate :D
Credit to Mitchelle D'Souza for the image.
We synthesized these insights to create our final production version of a Notion template, which you can find here!
Here's the showcase video that went along with our project showcase, narrated by me :)
Retrospective
Positive feedback from HCDE Master’s Students
After presenting our design solution to other HCDE students, we received a lot of positive responses and an interest in using our template for future projects!
We intend to share our template with students and track the impact in the following ways through qualitative feedback from students, and number of downloads.
Measuring success
We currently don’t have the ability to track the following metrics, but if there was a way, we would also like to track:
User retention - do they return to it after trying it once?
Number of tasks completed in the task manager - are they utilizing this feature?
Percentage of successful team setup processes - does the setup process make sense and do teams follow through with it?
Number of clicks for each resource in the Collaboration Toolkit - which are the most interesting/useful to students?
Learnings
It’s okay to change the scope of the project.
While ideally you get scoping right at the beginning of the project, we learned the importance of revisiting our initial scope and design question after our research phase. This allowed us to adapt our scope to better align with the needs that emerged during research instead of building something based upon little evidence.
Utilizing and adapting frameworks for team working sessions helps give clarity to all of our thoughts and ideas.
For the brainstorming phases, we utilized methods we had learned in class, which gave us a structured way to come up with and share our ideas. Putting these into practice helped solidify these methods as part of our toolkits, and equips us with the experience to reuse and expand upon our techniques in future projects as well.
