Personal project 2021
My Role
UX/UI design
Timeline
5 weeks
Tools used: Adobe XD, Optimal Workshop
Designlab is a UX/UI focused bootcamp for career changers with no design experience or professionals in the area that wish to expand their knowledge of the area.
In order for students to be connected to each other as well as see important announcements, Designlab requires students to log into a Slack server. Students are also able to ask questions about design, ask for feedback, and recruit for research.
As a Designlab student, I used the Slack fairly regularly , but one of the biggest troubles I had in the server was utilizing the research channels to be able to recruit enough participants for my research tasks. Half the times I would post a request it's like five other people decided it was the perfect time to post and drowns out my request so I need to either repost later or go to a different channel.
This is what inspires me to imagine and design a function that would allow research recruitment to be a lot easier for Designlab students.
I was looking for the perspectives of two specific groups who are involved in research in Designlab - students who are looking to recruit students for their studies (Researchers) and students who are looking to complete other students' research tasks (Participants)
While the users are usually both the researcher and the participant, I decided to separate them as two personas as both sides because they have very different needs in these two situations. Most cases, the researcher is also the participant in order to encourage more traffic towards their own research task.
I first had to understand the current options available for user research. I was able to explore the sites' recruitment functions and an idea of how they conduct user testing.
One of my original assumptions was that the current way of recruiting participants made it incredibly difficult for enough users to see the post before it gets pushed up by new posts, motivating users to repost their research tasks in other channels to increase visibility.
Therefore I decided to observe exactly how often research requests tasks are posted in the community slack that is, at the time, the most common source of recruitment.
From this observation, we can see that it's very difficult to keep a task request visible in the channel if you don't try to predict when other researchers might try to post their own tasks vs when participants may actually do your task, so researchers may resort to going to other, tangently related, channels that may not necessarily be meant for research to find their participants.
Based on my observation results, I wanted to understand how effective it is to actually post in non-research-related channels for your task requests.
I posted different copies of a survey in three different channels found from the first round of observation - research-and-testing, project-feedback, and p2m2. These surveys were posted with no other input outside of the initial posting -this means no interactions with any other user, no outreach to other users, no dropping links to other people's research tasks to complete, etc.
I interviewed 5 different users, all students of Designlab in different phases of the course.
Seeing as I was working on adding a new feature to a website, my mentor suggested I make a pre-prototype based on the original site that would only hint at the potential functions that would be added. As I'm a major user of the Designlab website, I was able to make some assumptions that helped guide me in my creation of the preprototype.
Some assumptions include:
Alongside the interviews I would also pull this preprototype out and ask them to interpret the different elements on the page and tell me what function they play if it was on the original site.
I took all of the results from the research so far and tried to organize it into general themes and problem areas in order to understand what are common problems and solutions participants had when it came to doing and posting research.
Using the results from the research, I created two separate personas to further define the needs of the two groups.
Diana is a student who has posted her research task and now is doing what she can to get as many participants as possible to ensure more accurate research results.
Mark is a student who likes giving back to the community and helping with other students' research, especially when he needs help himself.
To understand what I might need when I go into creating my wireframes, I created a userflow that specifies how a user may post a research task, participate in a research task, and edit or end a research task.
While I did not create traditional wireframes when working on my screens, especially as I had the preprototype to build upon, I was still majorly changing the design.
I really struggled with balancing between staying with the patterns presented in the original Designlab site versus creating a design that works best. I eventually decided to prioritize what I thought would be the best design choices.
As users are used to finding functions and pages starting with the sidebar, I decided to create a new icon for the research page on the side bar. In order to get a feel for how the icons are designed I also remade the rest of the icons.
I've designed an entire research function to add to the Designlab website in the image of what I thought is needed in a research function, however it was time for the other users to take their shot at the design and see if the function is actually usable for my user pool.
