Throughout these few weeks I have learned a lot about UX Design in general, as well as many new skills, some of which are technical skills I never heard of, such as affinity mapping, brainstorming solutions and the process of evaluating those solutions, and the analysis of interview results. I was also introduced to wonderful tools such as Figma, Miro, and Asana, which I will definitely continue to use even after this internship is over. I even had the opportunity to enhance soft skills such as collaboration and decision making with teammates, which I found especially rewarding. In general, this experience is giving me the opportunity to step outside my comfort zone, which I find very important.
One highlight from this experience was creating interview questions and analyzing those responses, during which I learned that questions must be carefully constructed in a way that gets the most useful information while removing bias. Another highlight has been creating a user flow based on the StemAway website, and using that to support certain issues we wish to solve. The third highlight was creating a low fidelity prototype, which was very gratifying, since this was the first somewhat tangible solution my team arrived at after so much hard work and dedication.
I have attended all group meetings except one, since that day I did not realize there was going to be a meeting. Besides those, my subgroup has been having our own meetings after each group meeting, as well as extra meetings if needed to complete assignments. The big group meetings I attended were:
June 1 Meeting 1
June 2 Meeting 2
June 5 Meeting 4
June 8 Meeting 5
June 9 Meeting 6
June 10 Meeting 7
June 15 Meeting 8
June 16 Meeting 9
The subgroup meetings I attended were on:
June 8
June 9
June 10
June 12
June 13
June 15
June 16
Some goals I have for the upcoming week are to get very accustomed to the newly introduced tools, to improve our prototype, and to further collaboration with my team.
Task 1: My team created interview questions together while on a video call, and afterwards, we asked our team leads to look over our questions for feedback. One of our team leads sent us a guide of Do’s and Dont’s when it comes to making interview questions, and we then adjusted our questions accordingly.
Task 2: Each individual interview note was turned into an insight, which was then used for affinity mapping. During this assignment, we ran into a little hiccup because of miscommunication, so my team already organized the insights a way in which we shouldn’t have done so yet. For the actual affinity mapping itself, a hurdle we faced during the process was grouping the insights into their own categories, since many of them were very similar, yet different in many ways. But overall, I am very happy with our final version.
Task 3: My team had multiple brainstorming sessions, during which we didn’t really have any hurdles. When it came time to evaluating the ideas, however, we needed to think about the best and most logical way to do dot voting. Then, when we were down to our final two ideas, we created a matrix chart to decide which solution out of the few that were really good was the best. This was challenging, but because of the guidance and education we have received from our team leads, it was very doable.
Task 4: We created a user flow chart for navigating the task bar. This was challenging because our solution encompasses a few things, so we needed to decide how we were going to structure our chart. But due to good teamwork and collaboration, we eventually decided it would be a good idea to have multiple branches of just a singular chart.
Task 5: We asked people to do card sorting of buttons accessible from the task bar, and then asked them to group the the cards in different ways. The only real hurdle from this task was figuring out the best way to interpret the results of the findings. Afterwards, we used that information to create the information architecture.
Task 6: We used Figma to create a low fidelity prototype of our solution, which wasn’t difficult, since we basically had it all planned out during the creation of the information architecture.